First of all, I think it's the right question. I think it's the reason the agency has been created in the first place. As Ian pointed out, we have some really excellent regional foreign direct investment offices. Montreal last year brought in $2 billion in foreign direct investment. Ian is the outgoing CEO of the Vancouver Economic Commission, which has done an incredible job, including securing billions of dollars of foreign film production in Vancouver.
While I've not been involved in the political arena at all, it's my understanding that the red tape is really more about agencies that don't speak with each other. There's a lack of coordination. You have an agency in Saskatchewan, one in Quebec, one in Ontario, one in B.C. None of them knows what the others are doing. They're all pursuing similar deals at times.
I've been told by a number of people that every day in the Vancouver airport, there may be 20 government officials who are totally unaffiliated, flying to China from Vancouver, many of them for the same reason, without knowing they're going for the same reason.
There is a lot of time and money being wasted. There's a lot of efficiency that is not being met. Creating an agency that has as its goal bringing some entrepreneurship to this area of government may be an ambitious goal, but it's the only reason I'm here, quite honestly, apart from my patriotism. The idea is to go and find these areas where coordination is lacking, and bring coordination to them. To the extent that there are deals being pursued by more than one province, or that should be pursued in partnership between two cities or two provinces, there is no Canada in this particular situation. There are cities and towns and provinces, and we need to bring them together and figure out a way to go out and get this business.
One last point has to do with your comment about benefits. Certainly, if we were to compete only on tax, then on the recent tax reduction in the United States, we would probably lose that battle, but as you also pointed out, we're competing on the basis of quality of life, education, a diverse workforce, and a number of other areas where I also believe that Canada is the best place to invest. I think that if it were easy and we had a super competitive advantage, we wouldn't need this agency. It's because the advantage is so thin that we need to have an agency like this that's going to aggressively pursue these competitive bids, and face some benefits that we can't offer, and hopefully find some that only we can offer.