Thank you.
I am Ken Birmingham, and I am the chair of the finance and taxation policy committee with the St. John's Board of Trade. I also sit on the board of directors with the St. John's Board of Trade. I'm joined today by Mark King, our assistant general manager with the St. John's Board of Trade.
I want to begin by thanking you very much for making St. John's a stop in your consultation process. We appreciate the opportunity to present today.
Today we'll cover a few different topics. Of course, the challenge is to get it in within five minutes. We're going to touch on competitiveness and productivity, equalization, personal taxation, corporate tax, small business income tax, debt, spending, public-private partnerships, and federal presence.
Of course we begin with competitiveness and productivity. That's the engine that drives the machine that produces the money that helps to pay for all the different programs. Ensuring Canada's long-term competitiveness in the global economy should be a top goal, especially given the surging new economies of China and India and the increasingly acute skill shortage and demographic challenges faced nationwide.
Canada's productivity gap with the U.S. has been pegged at about 15%, and we run the risk of falling behind there, so productivity is an important topic. Clearly, productivity growth will be increasingly important if we want to provide the fiscal resources to support critical investment in the future of education, health, and infrastructure, all of which are tied into the quality of life and competitiveness. The federal government must respond by making strategic policy decisions. Fiscal policies must include a competitive tax system and must encourage work effort, savings, investments, and risk-taking. There must be an emphasis on further reduction of federal debt and on program spending.
I'll turn it over to Mark now to speak briefly on the topic of equalization and taxation.