Chamber: Budget 2018 does nothing to address Canada’s competitiveness
Federal Budget 2018 contains $338.5 billion dollars in spending, a $18.1 billion dollar deficit, a number of laudable goals, but very little of concrete value to address lagging Canadian competitiveness.
It isn’t rare to hear pundits opine that “Canada is falling behind,” and there are a number of reasons they do so. Business investment in Canada has fallen over the past decade. Worker productivity, or the amount of GDP produced per person, is weak relative to our international peers at just $49 per hour worked compared to the US at $63 per hour. The performance of the Toronto Stock Exchange reflects investor confidence in our countries businesses and that confidence is lacklustre. While the US markets have seen record returns, the TSX is within a couple hundred points of where it was a year ago.
Much of this weak performance can be directly attributed to a couple components; weakness of the oil and gas sector, and the Trump tax plan in the US.
While Canada has struggled with building pipelines and regulatory approvals for major projects, the United States has built thousands of kilometers of new pipelines, increased their energy independence, and slashed corporate and personal tax rates, incenting billions of dollars in new investment and shifting capital and operations to the US from abroad.