Thank you very much.
As far as incentives, I'll first of all give you some background. As you know, in Ontario, municipalities are precluded from providing financial incentives to locate manufacturing or get investment into our communities. That's probably a good thing, in the global sense of Ontario municipalities. You don't want rich municipalities to be able to offer the best incentives, so the rich get richer and the poorer municipalities continue to starve for economic development.
But I think we have to understand the environment we live in today. In the United States, particularly the southern states, they seem to have either state or local incentives they can offer to locate manufacturing in their jurisdictions. That has a significant impact. In some cases municipalities can offer up to ten years of no property taxes. We can't do that in Ontario.
On what I think we need to have, the federal government could take on this responsibility, and somehow an analysis would be done on the merits of somebody locating in your municipality. Then we would be given the ability--probably through the provincial government--to allow that so we don't continue to see this drain of investment to the southern United States. Once those jobs are gone to the southern United States they're gone forever.
We have to understand that municipalities are also trying to position their communities for economic investment. That's why I'm advocating some sort of incentive program that recognizes that we still need to level the playing field for all municipalities across Canada. But there has to be some way for us to give something to keep them here, because economic development is about retention and growing, so I don't want to see them bleed off to other jurisdictions. When we lose them from Canada, obviously the economy of Canada suffers.
That's the idea. I hope I haven't been too long-winded.