Thank you all for the great presentations. I'm happy to hear them, and in the meantime, I'm just thinking, business-wise, how can we improve the situation? Anytime we hear about the Maritimes, we hear about these places. We know that forestry, fishing, and agriculture are the main resource industries.
I found common threads in your presentations, about competitiveness, investment, and government's role in helping the industries to improve their position by enhancing productivity and cost-effectiveness, and becoming more competitive on the world stage. It seems the threads come from many different places, such as intergenerational transfers. You are asking the government to facilitate the taxation issues there, and I do add my voice to you. I would like to see the budget consider that, for sure.
On the other side, there are short-term and long-term issues, but the common thread is that you are asking the government to basically invest some money on the taxation front and on the investment and innovation fronts.
How long has this problem been sitting around in your area, and where is the private sector? Where's your role as a private sector to push that? I believe that the private sector is the main element in being able to bring investment on board. If the federal government or the governments find that there is industry in a place and there is a business community in a place that can encourage such activity, I believe those combined efforts will definitely bring prosperity to the region.
So the question to all—and whoever wants to contribute, please do so—is how do you see the private sector role in this overall picture, in order to improve the overall situation once and for all, because we cannot keep going back and forth like that?