Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and honourable members.
Thanks so much for having us. It's an honour and a pleasure to be with you today.
We really appreciate the opportunity to provide input, because the federal budget is of vital importance to our network of 200,000 businesses across Canada. We want to make a couple of quick points.
Firstly, we're concerned about the competitiveness of Canada. We've had nine consecutive quarters of falling business investment. We've had two years of zero export growth. Back in 2015, we could have attributed the weak business investment to declining natural resource prices, but in recent quarters we’ve seen weakness spreading into a variety of investment sectors: machinery and equipment, software, R and D.
It may be that the renegotiation of NAFTA is having a chilling effect, but we think it's absolutely critical to improve Canada's competitiveness and bring down the cost of doing business in Canada. Our members tell us all the time that Canada is a great place to do business, but it's an expensive place. Wages are high; taxes are rising—provincial corporate taxes, CPP contributions, carbon levies, and El stuck at high levels. At the same time, many countries are lowering corporate tax rates, including Japan, Spain, Israel, Norway, Italy, the U.K., and most importantly the United States. Our competitiveness challenges will become acute if and when the U.S. is able to lower corporate income taxes, and this will impede our ability to attract and retain foreign investment. Urgent action is needed.
At the Canadian Chamber of Commerce we've tried to develop recommendations that would make a difference. A patent box regime would be a game-changer by creating a 5% tax rate on profits derived from patents developed in Canada. That would be a huge incentive for companies to develop and commercialize innovative technology here. We also ask you to increase the 100% writeoff of business investment in the first year. That would be a big boost for Canadian investment.
On infrastructure, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce is supportive of the government's efforts to address Canada's infrastructure deficit. But it's crucial that we be strategic. The commitment of $60 billion in new funding for green, social, and transit investments over the next decade is certainly needed, but in our view the federal plan lacks some balance. The trade-enabling infrastructure, the stuff that enables the movement of products, services, and people through Canada and to markets around the world, represents around 12% of the new plan.
With 60% of Canada's GDP tied to trade, this category of infrastructure can improve our productivity, our long-term global competitiveness, and our economic well-being. As Canada's trade infrastructure is showing signs of strain, our competitors are aggressively investing in improvements to trade infrastructure. We've been urging that trade-enabling infrastructure, these roads and ports and airports, be made an equal priority alongside the green, social, and transit infrastructure.
We're optimistic about the Canada infrastructure bank. In our view, one of the biggest potential benefits of the bank could be its intelligence function. If the new institution is able to take a national view on identifying Canada's long-term infrastructure challenges, our choke points and gaps, and create export corridors in a strategic manner, it could be very valuable in the long run. We also think it would be a win if the bank could help speed up the time it takes to get major projects moving and pull more private sector funding into these projects.
Let's take a real example. VIA Rail has an interesting proposal to create a dedicated passenger service along the Ottawa-Toronto-Montreal corridor. We're not talking about high-speed rail; we're just talking about normal rail. Right now trains can travel a maximum of 50 miles per hour because they're sharing those tracks with cargo trains. Dedicated passenger rail would enable them to basically double the speed, so you would get from here to Toronto in about two and a half hours. This is big bucks—about $3 billion or $4 billion. We think that's something the infrastructure bank could leverage or could provide guarantees on to attract private sector investment so that it's not our tax dollars.
I'll stop here with one additional point, which the chamber will continue to make. If the government wants to make it easier for the private sector to invest in infrastructure, we also have to reduce regulation. It's not just pipelines. Regulatory uncertainty and delays of privately funded infrastructure projects are a problem that still needs to be addressed when it comes to attracting investment capital to Canada. Efforts to reduce federal-provincial duplication or to have environmental reviews completed in a defined time period would be hugely appreciated. We could also maybe fast-track approval processes for certain types of green energy investments.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm happy to take any questions.