Thank you, Chair, and good afternoon everyone.
I'll start off with Mr. Stratton from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
I've been on this committee—it feels like since the beginning of time—since the last election. It's been fabulous. As someone who grew up in small-town British Columbia but had the privilege of becoming an economist by training and also of working on Bay Street and Wall Street for over 20 years, I probably read every economics report that comes out on a daily basis from three or four of the banks.
This week, we had A.T. Kearney come out with their competitiveness report. We came in at number two—I think it was behind Japan—in terms of confidence in where you would want to invest currently. They looked at positives and negatives, and they ranked us number three in terms of competitiveness in the world. We switched places with Germany. We were number two last year and number three this year, but we came up from number five and even below during the Harper time, during the Conservative years, because we've implemented many measures to improve our competitiveness.
With regard to our competitiveness—which concerns me because it creates jobs, investment and productivity—we brought in the accelerated investment incentive. We have a lower marginal effective tax rate per dollar of new investment in Canada than they do in the United States—four points lower—and one of the most highly skilled and educated workforces in the world. We've brought in three budgets that invest in Canada and Canadians.
I'm just curious because we had Kevin Milligan here last week commenting that the fiscal anchor should be our debt-to-GDP ratio, and it is declining on a federal basis. What is wrong with going down that trajectory? Our deficit-to-GDP ratio is below 1% at 0.7%. We've run a surplus for the first 11 months of the year, and we're investing in infrastructure. As we all know, there was an infrastructure deficit left behind from the previous government.