Honourable Chairman Easter and members of the committee, my name is Andrew Mutch, and I'm the president of Michelin North America (Canada) Incorporated. It is an honour to appear before you today on behalf of my great company.

Dedicated to the improvement of sustainable mobility, Michelin designs, manufactures and sells tires for every type of vehicle, including airplanes, automobiles, bicycles, farm equipment, heavy-duty trucks and motorcycles. In addition to tires, the company also publishes travel guides, hotel and restaurant guides, maps and road atlases.

Michelin has a long and distinguished history in Canada. In 1969, Nova Scotia was selected as Michelin's first North American operation, establishing sites in Pictou County and Bridgewater, which opened in 1971. A third facility, in Waterville, opened in 1982.

Today, Michelin Canada employs approximately 3,500 employees across our three plants in the province. We also employ an additional 130 people at our marketing sales office, based in Quebec, as well as field and support sales positions across Canada.

Michelin plays a vital role in the economy of Nova Scotia in particular. We are the largest private sector employer, and our tires represent the second-largest export from the province. In an ordinary year, that's more than five million tires.

Michelin is deeply committed to Canada and to contributing to the economic well-being of its people.

As everyone knows, COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on our country and on the automotive industry as a whole. The impact of COVID on Michelin specifically was rapid and significant. For the first time in our 50-year history in Nova Scotia, we were facing a sizable potential layoff. In my 34 years with the company, I have never experienced a situation like this.

Throughout the pandemic, we've been guided by our strong Michelin values. We focused on three things: taking care of our people, taking care of our customers and our business, and taking care of our communities.

Since the beginning, we've had an unwavering focus on the safety of our people. Early in the pandemic, we developed and implemented numerous protocols to ensure our employees' health and well-being. These included mandatory masking, physical distancing, extra cleaning protocols, screening for symptoms and many more. We are extremely proud that our facilities have remained a safe place to work throughout this pandemic.

We also minimized the negative impact to our employees with the assistance provided by the federal government's wage subsidy program. This enabled us to keep our employees connected to the workplace during operational slowdowns, while also enabling them to retain their benefits and to continue their pension contributions. We are proud to report that we have been able to recall all our employees now and have even hired additional workforce since last July, bringing our total employment numbers above pre-COVID levels.

Commercially, we saw an unprecedented impact on our sales. Our overall revenue dropped and commercial signals were clearly uncertain, but we needed to ensure that we were in a position to rebound quickly in response to any market upticks. CEWS helped us ensure that we could bring employees back to work as quickly as possible when the market showed signs of recovery.

In addition to mitigating the economic impact as the largest employer in Nova Scotia, we also felt we had an important role to play from a community support perspective. Among other things, early in the pandemic, Michelin was able to donate 200,000 masks to frontline health care workers and long-term care homes in Nova Scotia and Quebec. We were proud to show our community leadership in this time of crisis.

However, COVID is not over. We are working diligently every day to keep our plants and communities safe while meeting the needs of our customers and contributing to Canada's economy. The CEWS program was crucial in enabling us to do that and to minimize the financial impact to our employees and their families. We sincerely appreciate the responsiveness of the federal government in delivering the program that enabled us to retain our employees and then to begin to ramp back our business to normal levels. I have no doubt this program was instrumental in allowing us to reduce the impact of COVID on our employees, on our company and on our communities. For this we are grateful.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. I look forward to answering any questions you may have.

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