Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to comment on the standing committee's report on productivity and innovation.
I suggest that the committee did a good job in providing a 30 year history of the decline in productivity and documenting our current situation in terms of our productivity fall. However it failed to identify the underlying reasons for Canada's deteriorating productivity.
The official opposition believes that the role played by public policy during this period is a significant factor that needed to be examined. We suggest that the fundamental shift in government policy in the late 1960s and 1970s created the conditions that led to Canada's decline in productivity and therefore we offered a dissenting opinion to that effect.