Certainly.
I guess we should begin with a little bit of history. We've mentioned a couple of times here this morning that in fact a number of Canadian companies were forced to exit the export sector over the course of the post-crisis cycle. Those who stayed, of course, did so by being very careful on their costs and actually becoming more efficient.
One of the byproducts we're seeing of this is quite a good increase in productivity. In the Canadian economy, this is a very positive sign. What it means is that our competitiveness is not just about a lower Canadian dollar but better cost performance among those companies that survived this very difficult period. Of course, now we're laying the groundwork for whole new kinds of sectors, high-tech things like environmental technologies—windmill blades, new jet engines, smokestack emission scrubbers, or robots that inspect metal parts. I mean, ten years ago we didn't even imagine these things, and now they're part of our exports. That is the phase of the cycle that we call the rebuilding cycle, which we believe is just in progress. It's not just about expanding companies who are now up at their capacity; it's brand new companies. We'll be watching those signs very closely.
There are challenges that we're facing, of course. Where are you going to sell? You have to have that kind of global perspective, because it's not just about the U.S. That costs real money; it's hard. There are language barriers, and all kinds of rules and regulations that one has to understand. We have people to help companies do that. It's also about the cost of capital equipment, which came up before. A lot of that comes from other economies.
So you have to take those costs into account, but I'm very optimistic that we have all of the ingredients there for a very successful phase in our cycle.