Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all our witnesses for being with us today. I echo the sentiments of my colleagues. It's a great panel, with a lot of important points made.
Dr. Stanford, I want to direct my initial questions to you.
There are a lot of political voices in Ottawa who would say that we want higher productivity so that means we need higher business investment and that means we need lower taxes. As a political argument, it has the virtue of being simple, but it often doesn't fit the facts. What we've seen since the turn of the century is a drastic reduction in the corporate tax rate, outsized corporate profits and large capital reserves for large Canadian corporations, even as we see lower business investment and lower productivity.
I'm wondering if you could help to provide some insight into how, despite the fact that we've had an aggressive corporate tax reduction policy in Canada for a long time, the output hasn't been higher business investment and productivity, but actually less business investment and less productivity.