I am Canadian by birth, so that's why I'm so thrilled to be able to add my voice to this conversation in Canada.
What we've seen in the U.S., where I'm currently based, is Biden's recent executive order in July of last year that really took this all-of-government approach. He tasked different agencies—the Department of Defense, Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture and others—to really take a critical look at how anti-competitive behaviour was affecting their industry and to report back on that. Many of them did report back, yet the DOD said that this is actually a national security issue when you have many instances of single-source providers [Technical difficulty—Editor] and on and on it goes. Treasury came back with how this was affecting labour.
I think this isn't something that should be limited to the Competition Bureau. This needs to be something that Canada sees as fundamental to its future prospects of innovation. Canada continues to be ranked very low by the Conference Board of Canada in terms of our innovation prospects. We've had declining growth rates and entrepreneurship rates for a long time, and the OECD says one of the primary reasons is that we have an above-average use of antitrust exemptions that favour incumbents. This isn't something that is just a matter of supporting Main Street. It's a matter of Canada's future economic prospects, so it needs to be taken seriously across the whole of government.
That would be the thing that we'd like to leave everyone with today.