Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank Mr. Sabia and Dr. Treurnicht for the time and effort they and all the members of the committee put into these reports and on the advisory council. We thank you for your service. Both of you obviously have a long history of service.
I ran for office and wanted to be an MP to make sure that we have a good future for all Canadians, including my two very young daughters whom I care about deeply.
Three factors drive economic growth. The first is capital accumulation, the capital stock in an economy. The next is labour, i.e., immigration, birth rates, hours worked, and so forth. The third, which is the magical one, is known as technological advancement, productivity, and in the economic literature, total factor productivity. We see those three factors as the drivers of long-term economic growth in Canada.
When I look at the first one, capital, we have a lot of capital in this country, I think. Mr. Sabia, we have public pension funds, which we don't talk enough about, with have a lot of capital available to be put to use, whether for infrastructure, private equity, or an M and A activity.
With labour there's a headwind. We have a rapidly aging population. Not only is our labour force participation rate expected to weaken, but our labour pool could be shrinking in the years to come. I'm looking at some of the reports from Finance Canada.
Then we have a stubbornly low level of productivity, which is related to sources of clustering or lack thereof—but the commercialization aspect is getting better, I think.
What are the top three things you would recommend that we do to get that little bump, so we could get increased real GDP growth, which was once at 4.8% and is now 1.5%? It was 4.8% back in the 1960s and 1970s. Now we've averaged 2.4% in the last while and 1.5% to 2.5% is projected.