Right. It's a more complex question than it sounds, because productivity as measured there captures a lot of things in the economy. You could imagine if the U.K. was creating a lot of new jobs, but let's say the average job being created was in the service sector at a lower productivity level than in the financial sector, which is a high-productivity sector, or in manufacturing, which is high productivity. The mix of jobs can affect those numbers quite significantly.
I'm happy to say that Canada's labour productivity has picked up very strongly over the past year and a half to two years. Part of this is, no doubt, cyclical because it is the economy shaking off the collapse in oil prices and moving on to growth in other sectors, but it's also probably related to the thing I was mentioning a moment ago to your earlier question, which is that investment is picking up. If a company hasn't been investing, say, for five, six, or seven years, making their capital last, now every dollar they spend can have a big impact, because it's new technology or just upgrading things.
In addition, we now know that some companies can invest without there really appearing to be any investment. They do something in the cloud. They buy a service in the cloud instead of investing in the equipment themselves, and it looks as though the investment hasn't gone up, but we get the impact as if they had invested. The data are going to be increasingly difficult to interpret. StatsCan is all over this to help us understand it, but all that to say, we are at an encouraging stage here in Canada.