Thank you.
On April 30, Scott Smith of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in appearing before this committee, referred to my research that ranks countries in terms of useful connectivity. Briefly, my research emphasizes that the services, skills, and applications required to turn pipes and conduits into useful connectivity are what produce jobs and productivity. I'm going to talk briefly about that, then talk about the new databases now available at StatsCan that will allow us to look more deeply into the productivity dilemma. Lastly, I'll just throw out an idea about an untapped resource, the business schools across this country.
In our study, connectivity is usually understood to be the copper fibre, wires, network computers, mobile phones, and base stations. It is much more than that. That kind of physical infrastructure has to be expanded to include the complementary assets that economists talk about—the software skills, the applications embodied in people that are required to turn those assets into productivity enhancement.
Basically, Canada's gaps are not in infrastructure. There is a problem with SMEs in rural areas, but otherwise all major OECD economies have very high access to and penetration of fixed and mobile broadband. The studies that we rely upon, such as the OECD, remind me of the story about the drunk who's scrambling under a lightpost looking for his keys when a passerby says, “Can I help you? Where did you lose your keys?” And the drunk says, “Well, about a mile from here”. The passerby says “Why are you looking here?” and the drunk says, “Because there's light”. So, with a lot of these rankings, including my own, we're basically scrambling for data and measuring the obvious.
The reasons there are gaps in take up are not the obvious. For example, what we do when looking at business infrastructure, beside the obvious on the uptake of mobile and broadband, is to include the use of new data protocols such as ethernet and IP virtual private networks. We look at fixed and mobile enterprise lines. We look at cloud computing services as a percentage of business turnover. We look at corporate data services spending. What we're trying to do in my research is basically expand beyond the obvious and look at those sources of applications and services that are necessary for the take up of these services.
Statistics Canada has unveiled a new, very large database thanks to the use now of tax data. It took years to be able to use tax data because of the identity issues involved. A lot of the kinds of assets we want to measure can be written off, so tax data give us firm data and much better measures of the assets and services that firms are actually using.
The studies that will be used in the next few years will allow us to examine the unfortunate productivity gap. There's a new paper that came out today from Stats Canada by John Baldwin, who tries to look at some of the missing data that we don't have a good handle on. His analysis in the data available today suggests that the productivity gap between us and the U.S. is even larger than we had thought.
I have an idea. Business schools are all across the country. I've been a dean at DeGroote for four months. I was dean at the Haskayne School of Business in Calgary for five years. We have a tremendous network of business schools across the country. It's an untapped resource to enable us to help all users, especially SMEs, with applications and services. It's really the applications that are missing. When we're looking at Canadian data—and Michael talked about this—our kids are with it, but the managers in Canada don't seem to be. SMEs, of course, have the great problems that were just discussed, which is that there are economies of scale to using these.
So without talking to any of my fellow deans, I would propose that we're everywhere in the country and that together we can provide a network, in combination with the Conference Board and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and these other organizations, that would be a complete source. I think Michael would agree. If you look at some of the data on what people think of CEOs, do they trust them? No. Do they trust politicians? I'm sorry, they don't trust them either. They do trust professors, and I think with the advantages we have in universities, we can provide a willing arm to help.
I'm pleased to answer any questions as we move forward.