I do not have a satisfactory explanation for that history over the last 20 years. It's very hard to explain how the economy has behaved in this respect. The thing is, when you talk to companies, they have great productivity stories to tell and yet it's not in the statistics.
What I believe is that through the aggregation process we get a picture that is different for Canada from what the underlying truth often is. For example, we have a big increase in the resource sector because of the rise in terms of trade, primarily the oil sector. In level terms, that's a low productivity sector. You have to drill a lot of holes and then some of them work and others don't work, and so on. It's not like a fine-tuned factory where you can boost productivity with a new machine.
That shift in the weight of the economy changes the overall productivity picture in a way that may be hard to explain, yet if you look down at the firm level, all is well.
I'm not trying to confuse the picture. I'm just saying it's not actually that easy for us to explain even ex post.