Industry and Technology

Opening remarks

Good afternoon, Chair and honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity and the invitation to be here. My name is Marc Lecours. I'm the owner of Preferred CNC and Michmar Engineering. I was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario. I've spent 42 years in the mould-making industry. I founded both of my companies, which together employ 20 skilled individuals here in our community. Preferred CNC is a specialized CNC machining company that supports mould-makers locally in Windsor, as well as customers across the border in Michigan. We focus on precision machining for plastic injection moulds, automation, assemblies, fixtures and dies. Our capabilities include five-axis and three-axis machining, CNC turning and metal additive manufacturing. Michmar Engineering is now in its 20th year. It specializes in plastic, injection-mould design and continues to support a wide range of customers across North America. Together, our companies have also driven innovation. We developed patented products called the EZ Slider, which replaces traditional slides within moulds, lifters and hydraulic systems with a more cost-effective, efficient solution for mould-makers. It is patented in the United…

Opening remarks

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and hon. members. My name is Mathieu Lavigne, and I am the vice-president of public and economic affairs at the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec. With me today is my colleague, Hubert Rioux. I will give a brief introduction and then I will give the floor to Mr. Rioux, who will get into the substance of our presentation. To summarize, the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec brings together Quebec's 120 local chambers of commerce and acts as Quebec's national or provincial chamber. It has 1,000 members companies and represents a total of 40,000 businesses of all sizes and from across all sectors and regions of Quebec. Many businesses are directly affected by the subject of today's consultation. Now that I have explained who we are, I will let my colleague present our arguments on the issue.

Opening remarks

Thank you, Mr. Lavigne. Thank you everyone for having us. There are indeed many businesses in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada that are dealing with major commercial upheaval as a result of both the U.S. tariffs imposed under section 232 and the fundamental change in the way those tariffs are applied. The decision to now apply ad valorem tariffs, or tariffs on the total value of the products rather than on the relative value of the steel, aluminum or copper content, is having extremely serious consequences. This is a technical change with a disproportionate economic impact. In practical terms, the more a product is processed and the higher its added value, the more it is penalized. The result is that secondary or tertiary processing companies, which are the heart of Quebec's manufacturing sector, are over-penalized. Their gross margins, which are already slim in many cases, are being almost entirely or entirely wiped out by the tariffs. In many cases, the U.S. market has become economically inaccessible because our products cannot compete as a result of these tariffs. Businesses whose products were and still are compliant with the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, or CUSMA,…

Opening remarks

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of this committee. I appreciate the invitation to appear before you today as part of this study. My name is Aaron Aalbers. I am president of Aalbers Tool and Mold, a tool shop based in Windsor, Ontario. The recommendations I have largely line up with the previous speaker's, so I will instead focus on the more personal story of our struggles and difficulties. What we do is design and manufacture precision plastic injection moulds that support Canada's advanced manufacturing industries, particularly the automotive sector in the Windsor-Essex region. Our company was originally founded in 1982 and grew from a single employee to our current size of over 135 employees, managing an average of $24 million in sales within a highly competitive market. In this industry, due to the length of planning done by our customers to arrange for full automotive parts production, as well as our coding and contract negotiations.... Many of these take place over several months to a year or more before we get approval to begin the work. Since our founding, we have never faced the types of challenges these 232 tariffs supply. The suddenly changing values, the…

Opening remarks

Thanks. You don't know me very well, but I'm going to try to stick to that five-minute limit. I'm going to be candid, because I think the two presenters got very specific about the business they're in. Let me break the North American auto sector into four buckets. In the first bucket, there are the materials that go into vehicles and the materials that also go into the tools that make the parts that go into the vehicles. That's one issue, and it's one set of issues that we have to deal with. In the second bucket, there's tooling. This includes, specifically, moulds and auto-specific tools. The main competition has been China. It has been for the last 15 years, for lots of reasons. That's the real competition. It has been the canary in the mine for the automotive sector in North America. What the Chinese have been able to do in terms of winning the market share and hollowing out the base in North America is something for the rest of us. In the third bucket, there are the parts. We use the tools to make the parts, and 75% of a vehicle is made by the parts suppliers. Finally, you have the final bucket, which is the automotive bucket. This is the only one facing the regular…