It concerns me very much. I think for a period of time it was possible in Canada, back around the middle of the last decade, to say, well, we had an oil price collapse and the resource industries were under pressure, and then with COVID and so on, different countries reacted in different ways, but now that we've come out of that, it's quite disturbing to see how Canada is struggling compared with other countries, particularly the United States. The strong U.S. economy is actually buoying us right now. It's helping our trade balance and making us look a little better than we otherwise might.
We like having them as a trading partner, but they're also competitors. They compete with us for talent. A recent study out of Statistics Canada showed how difficult a time Canada has in retaining talented immigrants. One place they naturally tend to go to—if you've already uprooted yourself once, it's easier to do it again—is the United States.
This gap does concern me. One of the points made by one of my fellow panellists concerned open banking and the lack of investment in some technological opportunities that other countries are taking advantage of. I didn't want to overwhelm the group with numbers when I was comparing investment, but if you look at machinery and equipment investment, an area that people often associate with more technological innovation and better future prospects, the overall gap between Canada and the United States in terms of investment is about 50¢ on the dollar. For M and E it's only 40¢, and in intellectual property products or software and so on, the area where we expect a lot of progress in the new economy, it's only about 30¢ on the dollar.
If U.S. workers are getting two and a half times as much machinery and equipment investment per person as Canadian workers are, and more than three times the amount of intellectual property products investment, then, to use a construction analogy, they're using excavators and we're digging with shovels or maybe even with our bare hands.
This concerns me a lot. It's quite a new development to see this gap opening up the way that it is. Provisions on interest deductibility or certain types of taxes or even, as I said, drafting of competition policy that was clearly done in haste and that sort of thing, in addition to some of the headline issues like corporate tax rates, and so on, are discouraging to people. They tend to avoid jurisdictions that don't seem to be able to get their act together.