Thank you, Mr. Chair, and to the minister, welcome, in your new role. I realize it's been over four months, so it's great to have you here for the first time. I also want to recognize your officials who are with you who I think always do excellent work on behalf of Canada.
Thank you, guys, for what you do.
We're obviously going to support this trade deal, so I will just get that out of the way right now. Thank you for recognizing the work that our former minister did. I'll do the same thing. I appreciate some of the things in the economic statement—not all of them, but obviously the accelerated capital cost allowance is important for business. We've heard that here.
I think the increase in SIF funding, or the strategic innovation fund, is good. The challenge remains still that SMEs don't qualify for that. As we've seen happen as a result of tariffs, specifically while the strategic innovation fund is good and helpful, it's only really good for larger companies.
One of the questions I want to talk to you about is competitiveness. That's always the challenge. I agree that both our governments have been very similar in trade deals and I think it's important as we move forward, but I think the challenge still remains that we lack a competitive advantage when it comes to a number of different issues in the economy. The challenge I have right now is it's great that we have trade deals, but if we're not competitive at home, it makes it difficult as we move forward. We can talk about the energy sector.
There are a ton of things, but my concern is that there have been major regulatory reforms in the U.S., as well as tax reform. This is our largest trading partner. I'm not going to talk about carbon tax and I'll leave that to my partner, but one of the challenges is that we're not nearly as competitive as we need to be. I'd just like to offer you a quick comment on that. Then I have another comment on trade commissioners.