Quite frankly, Mr. Del Mastro, I think there's a consensus in Canada among people who look at the Canadian economy, including Roger Martin at the Rotman School of Business in Toronto, others who have analyzed the Canadian economy in our think tanks and so on, and members of various political parties. People who have looked at this issue say we have productivity challenges. How do we address that?
One way of addressing it, clearly, is to reduce the corporate tax burden, which we are doing. It's important that it be done in a predictable and certain way, so that corporations know what their tax rates will be going forward and can plan accordingly. We want to encourage investments in machinery and equipment, certainly, and in new technologies. For those long-term commitments, corporations need tax certainty in order to assess the appropriateness of making those kinds of long-term investments, which we know increase productivity.
Increasing productivity is not about people working harder in Canada; Canadians work hard. It's about working smarter, if I may put it that way. It's about all of us being more efficient through the use of technologies. We just have to look at how much more efficient we all are today through the use of software that we didn't have before. As an easy example, we know that cars are being produced today with technology that results in those plants being more productive than they used to be.