Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Barton, and thank you to you and the other individuals who have participated and developed the three sets of reports.
In reviewing the third set of reports, obviously you had the October 2016 first report, with a number of recommendations, and the second report. It's great to see we've completed the CETA with Europe. We've recently announced the CPTPP agreement with our Asian partners largely, but also Mexico, I believe. We've moved forward on the Canada Infrastructure Bank; the global hub for attracting FDI; and are moving forward soon, I would assume, on a superclusters agenda, identifying the sectors that were identified in the reports. There's much to do, as you've identified in these reports that I've read.
There was one thing that caught my attention in one of your reports, which really speaks to attracting business investment. It's something that was even identified last month in the Bank of Canada's monetary policy report. In your report, “Investing in a Resilient Canadian Economy”, you say that we're not seeing as much greenfield investment as we should. I shall read it verbatim:
While it is difficult for the government to directly lower input costs for Canadian businesses, it can—and must—tailor the regulatory and tax systems to a more dynamic era of technological disruption and global competition.
It's on page 9 of that report. I pulled that statement or sentence out of all the reports, because we really haven't had a review of our tax system prior to the use of mobile phones and the Internet. You've pointed that out in the third series of your reports.
I was wondering if you could please elaborate on that. How important is it to get that right and get productivity going in our economy—which has sort of picked up—so that investment conditions are conducive from a tax and regulatory point of view?