Thank you.
Mr. Chair, and committee members, thank you for the invitation to take part in your consultations on Bill C-44. I have some very short opening remarks. I will give you the general overview from the Business Council's perspective on the budget, and then I'll specifically talk about infrastructure and investment.
The Business Council of Canada represents the chief executives and entrepreneurs of 150 leading Canadian companies in all sectors and regions of the country. Our member companies employ 1.7 million Canadians; account for more than half the value of the Toronto Stock Exchange; contribute the largest share of federal corporate taxes; and are responsible for most of Canada's exports, corporate philanthropy, and private sector investments in R and D.
In the council's pre-budget submission, we urged the government to adopt a laser-like focus on competitiveness as the key to generating long-term economic growth and ensuring a better life for all citizens. We believe that Canada needs a focused strategy to encourage new business investment, attract international capital, and enhance Canada's ability to compete in a global economy.
Among other recommendations, we called on the government to streamline the approval process for private sector infrastructure projects, develop a comprehensive plan to broaden the tax base and bring down rates, and set out in detail a fiscally sustainable path to balanced budgets with a commitment to an explicit debt-to-GDP target. Acting on these recommendations would, among other things, help position Canada as a global trade and investment hub, and we believe this is increasingly important in the face of protectionist and competitiveness threats.
So, we welcome the government's efforts to establish the Canada infrastructure bank to attract private sector and institutional investment to new revenue-generating infrastructure projects. Targeted spending on productivity and trade-enhancing infrastructure projects would bolster Canada's long-term competitiveness. In our view, the infrastructure bank should be designed to stimulate, through open and competitive bidding, the development of infrastructure projects that would not otherwise be pursued by federal, provincial, or municipal authorities.
But importantly, injecting new capital alone will not improve infrastructure. The federal government can lay the groundwork for new, major infrastructure projects by ensuring the regulatory approval processes are transparent, predictable, fact-based, and capable of rendering decisions in a very timely manner.
Turning to foreign investment, another important element of Bill C-44, the Business Council has long called for the creation of a single window to attract major investments to Canada, and for that reason we welcome the proposed invest in Canada hub. Canada's ability to attract foreign investment has diminished. In the early 1980s, the stock of inward foreign direct investment, FDI, as a share of GDP was higher in Canada than in countries such as Australia, Norway, Sweden, and the U.K. Today the situation is reversed. Canada lags behind all four of those countries as a destination for foreign investment, and over the same period our country's share of the global FDI stock has fallen from 8% to just below 3%. According to the “World Investment Report 2016”, compiled by UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Canada does not even rank among the top 15 prospective host economies for multinational investment in the 2016-18 period. That's a drop from the 11th destination last year. This is based on a survey of multinational executives, and we find that quite a worrying ranking.
We believe that the proposed investment hub will help Canada reverse these worrying trends and bring new investment into Canada. Finally, we believe that foreign investment is beneficial to Canada, except in very unique circumstances. For that reason, we support raising the Investment Canada Act review threshold to $1 billion in Bill C-44.
With that, I conclude my remarks and look forward to questions.
Thank you.