Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, everyone.
Turning first to the Business Council of Canada, to Brian and John, welcome.
I have trumpeted this in the past couple of weeks. The A.T. Kearney report that came out last week showed Canada as the number two preferred location in the world for foreign direct investment, moving up three spots, only slightly behind the United States of America. I think this is a pretty good ranking and indicative of a number of measures we have taken. These include the formation of Invest in Canada; the signing and completion of the CETA trade deal; the CPTPP; our entering into negotiations with Mercosur; and obviously the ongoing NAFTA negotiations, which we well know about; and also the number of other measures we've taken, such as the supercluster agenda, or supergrappes, as they say in French.
There are a lot of good things happening. Our debt-to-GDP ratio is also declining, which, according to some economists, is another fiscal anchor that we can look at. We have created 600,000 new jobs and our unemployment rate is at a 40-year low.
Wouldn't you say those are pretty good things?