In Denmark, government spending is 55% of GDP, and if you net $51,000 Canadian a year, you pay 63% of your gross income in taxes. That's income taxes and payroll taxes, not including sales taxes. I'm not saying that's bad, but that's a different kind of society from the one we live in. Maybe that's the society we need to go to. I'd like to be part of that debate.
But again, I'm arguing that there's a dialogue that needs to be had, and when we talk about communities on that list of 30 vulnerable communities, three are in Newfoundland, two are in Nova Scotia, two are in New Brunswick, and four are in Quebec. We've got it in our heads that this is an Alberta story. This is not an Alberta story.
I also want to touch a little bit on the whole complication of international trading. You know what I'm saying. I'm saying we can do what we want to do, but the devil's in the details. This report says there's an unlimited supply of capital, so all we have to do is hike the price of energy and all of the capital we need will flow into the country to reduce our energy demand.
As I said, in Europe when they hiked the price of capital, two things happened: manufacturing employment in Canada increased 26% and manufacturing capacity in Germany, Denmark, and Sweden fell 11% to 17%. If you look at the foreign direct investment flows, those European nations invested more capital in Canada between 1996 and 2007 than they invested in all of Asia, including China.