Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Vancouver.
My name is Janette Pantry, and I am the chair of the Vancouver Board of Trade's government budget and finance committee. With me in the audience is Dave Park, the assistant managing director and chief economist of the Vancouver Board of Trade. He will answer your questions later on behalf of the board.
Thank you for making the trip to Vancouver for your pre-budget consultations.
We are here today representing approximately 5,300 members of the Vancouver Board of Trade, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and carries on business throughout British Columbia and elsewhere.
We provided you with a detailed copy of our recommendations for the upcoming budget. You asked us to focus on Canada's place in the competitive world, and in particular on four specific questions. We circulated a PowerPoint handout that we'll refer to during our remarks.
The first question you asked us to address is, what specific tax and/or program spending measures should be implemented to ensure that our citizens are healthy and have the right skills?
Focusing on the health aspect of this question, if you turn your attention to slide 2 of our package, you will see that Canada's spending ranks in the top third of OECD nations, yet our outputs are near the bottom: the number of hospital beds, 21 out of 27 countries; the number of physicians in Canada, 26 out of 29 countries; and number of MRI machines in Canada, 11 out of 23 OECD countries.
In considering Canada's place in a competitive world, this slide raises questions—