Those are all elements that position Canada well to develop a strategy to improve its game, improve its position as the world digs itself out of this recession.
As you pointed out, the U.S. is going to face very serious fiscal challenges that will affect its ability to treat taxation on investment and on individuals, that affect its ability to spend in the right way to strengthen its economy.
We like the government's Advantage Canada strategy. We like the very notion of focusing on advantages. We have to look very hard at capitalizing on our advantages and aggressively pursuing them so that something fundamental is changing now in this year. It's a good time to ask, with these changed circumstances, how can we wrap together the various things we are doing?
We're investing in science and technology. We have a good capacity in technology. We're lowering our taxes on investment quite significantly, both at the federal level and the provincial level. We're now much more competitive on that. Our fiscal position is a fundamental advantage, as are the stability of our society, the attractiveness of our quality of life, the stability and quality of our legal and regulatory regime, even though we have to re-think it again. The world is changing so much. We have a lot of our regulatory regime that's based in the pre-Internet era, and that kind of thing.
What we have is a lot of very good things that we've been doing, and an extraordinary opportunity to look at that in a period of tremendous change. How do we wrap that together in a package now that reflects the future and innovation-based recovery that will really...? Let's capitalize, let's use this crisis to step ourselves up in the global situation.
We know, for example, that people say sometimes that Canada is not well known for innovation and technology. Well, we just need to dig out our BlackBerrys to know. And there are many other examples. Our reputation around the world in e-government is there. It's getting a little thin, because we have not been driving that as an explicit goal for our government. There are all kinds of things we can do now to wrap these things together in a strategy. That's why we've been raising the issue of an ICT strategy that is not so much about our industry but about capitalizing on technology and innovation to drive Canada's future success.