Thank you, Anne.
The scorecard is an important tool for governments and for people in general to see where the country is going on important policy areas and basically where we need to go as well.
Where are we today? The pandemic created new challenges. It disproportionately impacted lower-income Canadians. Inflation is rising. Economic challenges are also growing and, as David Dodge pointed out, we have an aging population, weak business investment and poor productivity.
Our scorecard does show that we are moving in the right direction on some fronts, but we're not doing it fast enough. As the metrics are analyzed, we remain concerned about persistent weakness, which is threatening to undermine our future prosperity.
The two most important measures of living standards are output per capita—labour productivity—and equality, and we're going in the wrong direction. For example, on a per capita basis, our economy is not only stalled; it's actually contracting. Real GDP per capita has fallen for four straight quarters, and we are producing less per person today than we did in 2018.
On labour productivity—that's the amount of output generated per hour—it looks even worse. It has fallen in 11 of the last 12 quarters, and the productivity numbers in the first half of the year are below what they were in the final six months of 2014. If things don't change, we'll soon be talking about a lost decade of productivity. The scorecard also shows business spending on research and development continuing to stagnate and lag behind our peers.
However, here is some good news: We see that businesses are slowly stepping up for the first half of the year. Non-residential business investment was up and annualized at 8%, which is pretty solid growth and is much stronger than the economy as a whole. There are also signs of rebounds in the construction of new factories, though we're still well short of prepandemic levels. We really have to double down on our collective efforts to figure out ways to continue to support an upward trend in investment.
It's back to you, Anne.