Thank you.
When you people are looking for the proper balance between the private sector being taxed and the citizen--the proper balance between the two--I think when you're evaluating that you have to look at what our needs are in terms of human and financial capital for the coming years. Because of the growth we anticipate, we're going to need large amounts of capital, and we'll also be facing extreme shortages of human capital. So there has to be a balance between what we're offering in terms of being able to reward capital while also offering rewards to human capital.
People are motivated a little differently from businesses. People will make a choice that is positive, perhaps at a little bit of discomfort and not necessarily in their own self-interest. They might choose altruistically. Because of the Canada Corporations Act, businesses are typically responsible to their shareholders to deliver the best returns and advocate those policies, so their decision process is based on the best results for their shareholders.
The challenge we have is creating a brand for Canada that's going to attract international capital that doesn't necessarily come at the lowest cost for taxation. There's a theory in business that you don't want the low-cost customer, the people who will go to shop across the street because it's a dollar less. Those people do not return; they do not invest in your commerce, so they're not the most valued customer. What you want to do is develop a customer who recognizes value-added that you're delivering, and court them, because their partnership is going to bring more value. They recognize the value they're investing for the value that is hidden.
Part of this process, I believe, is that if we start evaluating our capital investment decisions based with real options accounting strategies that recognize hidden value that's delivered through future flexibility, where a decision will be made based on not necessarily the best cashflow, but more that there's a future option that gives you flexibility, that's worth more than the underlying cost of securities. This is covered a bit in my brief.
Basically, what I would like to see is the opportunity to develop a brand for Canada where we are leveraging our ethics, our community, where we have high respect for the rule of law. We are reducing the risks for the investor by our very community, inasmuch as we have a great deal of political stability, fiscal stability and we're looking at a very prosperous future. That means we don't necessarily need to reward investors with lower taxation rates because we've already mitigated the risk.
In investment, there's risk and reward. If you're reducing the risk, you certainly don't necessarily have to sweeten the reward, because the balance works out.
So I think what we have to do is work on developing our communities through a lot of investment in the communities, but also looking at shifting to consumption-based taxation; from personal income tax to consumption-based taxation.
The idea of this would be perhaps an idea of an ecological cost-of-ownership tax, which would replace the GST and would allow people to factor in the ecological cost of their purchase—have it broken out with labelling or whatever—so that you know that there's an energy component that was in the tax on this item, and you can make a more responsible choice at the till. At the same time, we'd shift the taxation from income tax to consumption taxation, so we can direct individual decisions and corporate decisions toward better ecological choices.
We could even integrate with the ecological cost-of-ownership tax, things such as the levies we now have in British Columbia for the disposal of goods that you purchase, because you are buying something for its life cycle and it also ends up in landfill or needs to be remediated in some way. These costs also need to be covered.
I guess that's more or less all for now.