Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.
I'm pleased to present a few comments and highlights of our submission on the federal budget. I want to let you know, we've been working with—it's kind of unusual for us—Fort McKay First Nation on some of the ideas and concepts that we bolted into our overall submission. I know the chief had hoped to be here today co-presenting with me, but is instead attending, along with many other Canadians, the memorial service for the Honourable Jim Prentice tomorrow. He does express his regrets.
I've read through many of the other presentations made to you over the past few weeks and I'm struck by the wealth of ideas provided, mostly in the spirit of growing the Canadian economy for the benefit of all Canadians. I'm also here today to tell you that our sector has participated in and supports much of the work that is being done by the advisory council on economic growth. We look at that as a very important piece of work that provides a longer-term view of economic growth pathways for government to consider. Equally important, the longer-term approach, such as defined in there, helps provide context for shorter-term actions for economic growth.
First, I want to emphasize what we already know. Much of Canada's historical, present-day, and future economy includes our ability to take advantage of one of our foundational strengths, our ability to develop and trade our natural resources. That requires an ability to better attract foreign direct investment into Canada. As noted by the advisory council on economic growth, Canada has fallen behind comparable jurisdictions in terms of FDI growth over the past several years. We certainly welcome the government focus through that advisory council recommendation on that activity.
But there are also opportunities for government to maximize benefits from the utilization of capital available within Canada. I know we've talked about this when I have previously come before this committee. Our sector has been known as one of the country's largest recipients of capital investment for some years now, and will continue to be. We believe that there are some opportunities for our government to bring real change to our tax system, for example, that will optimize the utilization of capital in Canada to increase the benefits for all Canadians.
I wanted to highlight a couple of examples we've provided and work through a lot more detail.
One specific opportunity we see is to review and implement changes to the large corporation tax rules under CRA. We believe refocusing this with a mindset towards some more transparency and efficiency will give tremendous opportunity for redeployment of underutilized capital. We believe not just from our sector, but from across sectors, that we can set a target of anywhere from $10 billion to $30 billion or more in underutilized capital to be better deployed across Canada and across sectors.
A second opportunity we've identified is reviewing and looking at the fiscal treatment under CRA of capital costs in our sector. Certainly the CRA rules for capital cost treatment have not kept up with the technology and innovation changes that have dramatically changed the nature of our business not just in Canada but around the world, but specifically in North America. We think now is the time to relook at that and find opportunities to be more efficient in how capital is treated under CRA.
A third opportunity is—you've heard this many times in previous testimony from what I've reviewed—in the scientific research and experimental development tax incentive program. There are great opportunities in that program—as I think you've heard from many others—opportunities such as broadening the program to provide tax credits for capital expenditures on clean tech and climate change mitigation. There are several other opportunities in there that I know you've heard about.
Stepping back for a moment, more broadly, we'd offer a few other recommendations as well. We certainly want to see the continued support of the development of infrastructure that diversifies the markets that Canada's natural resources can access. As you know, I'm not allowed to speak very often without mentioning pipelines at least once, so I will mention that, but there's also the opportunity for marine infrastructure in Canada and certainly the natural gas export infrastructure, which is very important for our sector.
The second opportunity we see is around the innovation agenda. We saw a great start in that in the last budget. We're looking for more definition and more specificity going forward.
Certainly, we believe our sector has been developing some good foundational strength and development of what we would call an innovation super-cluster framework. That would help lead governments' innovation agendas. We're thinking about inclusion beyond our sector opportunities in related sectors that are here today as well.
We believe government should support the opportunity that we would present as a global-scale strength in this innovation super-cluster framework, which is pretty unique and should be taken advantage of.
We also believe government should continue, as we saw in the last budget, efforts to further—