A few years ago we went through the exercise of going through Canada's industries, industry by industry, comparing our productivity with that of the U.S., and, as Jayson said, in a number of industries we were actually more productive than were our peers in the United States.
The biggest thing to us is industry mix. The mix of industries in the U.S. is not identical to what it is here, so you're seeing that some very highly productive industries, such as financial services and IT, have a much larger footprint in the U.S. So that helps to skew their productivity picture to be higher than what we have here. But when you get to individual industries and you see where we're lagging behind the U.S., a couple of things stand out. First is openness. Industries that we tend to produce tend to underperform on productivity measures because they're not facing the same competitive pressures that other open industries are facing.
The other place where we saw Canada lagging was in industries that benefit from certain economies of scale or concentrations. A big one that we lagged in was, for example, retail trade. Our retail trade industry is much less competitive than is the one in the United States, and it's simply because we have a much smaller population spread over a much wider area. It's a lot harder to get the economies of scale in terms of logistics and warehousing, and to get products to our customers quickly at the lowest possible cost.
So those are the two big issues that stood out for us.