Thank you very much for having me. It's an honour to be invited to present to this group. I apologize for doing it online.
I accepted right away when invited to appear in front of the committee. It's part of my job and, as I said, an honour, but I have to admit that after accepting, I had doubts. You know this already, but I'll stress that Bill C-59 is 524 pages long. The summary at the front alone is six pages. I counted very quickly about 60 bullet points, or bullet-like points, about provisions that are explicitly identified as affecting 20 pieces of legislation. I don't know how many more are not explicitly identified.
The Liberal Party's 2015 election platform contained a plank to ban omnibus legislation, and it's unfortunate that it didn't happen. Critics say that omnibus bills prevent parliamentarians from doing their jobs, and I agree. I don't think parliamentarians should acquiesce in things that prevent them from doing their jobs.
Given the size and heterogeneity of Bill C-59, I think it's better to use the rest of my opening time to underline the scale of the challenge facing Canada’s economy and Canadian living standards.
If you had a chance to look at the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report yesterday, there was an eye-catching figure showing that real GDP per person has been falling since the third quarter of 2022. The bank expects that decline to continue through the first half of this year. We know people are feeling squeezed and having trouble making ends meet. Eight quarters in a row of declining real output per person will do that. The average Canadian has fewer resources for food, clothing, housing and paying taxes, let alone supporting cultural institutions or donating to charities.
Why is that happening? It's because of low investment. Capital investment creates the tools that make people more productive. It makes people able to earn more for every hour they work, but capital in Canada per worker is falling. Nothing like this has happened since the 1930s and the Second World War.
I want to underline that it's also not happening anywhere else in the developed world, and it's certainly not happening in the United States. At the C.D. Howe Institute, we track business investment per member of the workforce in Canada versus the United States, adjusting for purchasing power. We've never quite been on a level, but 15 years ago, for every dollar of new investment that the typical U.S. worker enjoyed every year, the typical Canadian worker got close to 75¢, about three-quarters as much. Ten years ago, for every dollar of new investment per U.S. worker, the Canadian worker got about 66¢, so we were down to two-thirds as much. By the end of last year, in the fourth quarter of 2023, for every dollar of new investment per U.S. worker, her or his Canadian counterpart got 52¢—barely half as much.
That spells trouble for competitiveness and the future earnings of Canadian workers. My friend and former federal finance minister Bill Morneau warns in his book that a steady erosion of Canadian living standards will make Canada less attractive to talent, and this is a vicious circle playing out as we speak.
What could turn this around? We'll be happy to take questions on that.
To conclude, I want to return to the impossibility of scrutinizing long and heterogeneous bills such as this one properly. Other witnesses have commented on specific provisions they thought were poorly drafted or could stand improvement. I note that the bill itself corrects some drafting problems in previous legislation.
One of the discouragements that I hear a lot about, when it comes to people speculating about why investment in Canada is weak—this includes members of the C.D. Howe Institute’s monetary policy council, who think low investments and low productivity growth are making inflation harder to control and thus keeping interest rates up—is policy uncertainty.
That's true on every level. Some of it is the threat of more populist tax measures, and I think we have a couple in this bill. It's also just sheer incompetence in execution. I'll mention in passing the bare trust debacle. You need effective parliamentary scrutiny to avoid confidence-destroying mistakes, and a bill of this length and heterogeneity precludes effective parliamentary scrutiny.
Thank you for having me here, and I'm sorry to conclude on a down note. I look forward to your questions.