Corporations look at tax strategies, stable banking, and things like that. Definitely, they are factors for investment, for what I would call a “jobs strategy”.
However, when it comes to getting money for Canadian ideas, that is called “innovation outputs”. There is a very big difference between jobs strategy and innovation outputs.
When a multinational corporation invests in Canada, it is creating what you would call “labour productivity”. If you see that chart I showed you at the back—and this is extraordinarily important—Canada's labour productivity over the past 30 years has outperformed the U.S. Our capital productivity has outperformed the U.S. The U.S. has averaged 1% growth a year over the past 35 years in multifactor innovation productivity. We have had zero.
If you look at it through that lens, that explains all of our productivity gaps with the U.S. I have no doubt that we will get investments for jobs and for different things, because Canada is a very good country. Will this lead to innovation outputs of Canadian ideas that bring the wealth from that globally? That is the gap we are looking for in Canada's prosperity.
I am not saying that everything is bad. I am saying that this is shockingly bad for innovation outputs in Canada. That is very different from somebody opening up a plant in Canada, which is a jobs strategy.