PrefBlog

Canada’s biggest rent-seeker, Royal Bank of Canada President & Chief Executive Officer Dave McKay, gave a speech in Montreal titled Our New Competitiveness: Thriving in the Age of Disruption:

Our competitiveness in the world continues to be a topic of debate in Canadian business. The U.S. has moved the yardsticks. So has China, in a different way. It’s clear we can’t afford to stand still.

We know a lot of great investment is coming into the country. But we can’t ignore the increasing flow of capital that is leaving too.

We’re hearing from clients in food processing, manufacturing, agriculture, real estate and clean technology. They are telling us we need to take stock of our competitive conditions.

We welcome the commitment by the federal Finance Minister to personally look at these challenges and make it – in his words – his number one priority.
This debate is partly about taxes, of course. But it is also about much bigger challenges too.

To remain competitive in this new landscape, we need to understand the skills of our workforce and invest strategically to ensure we stand out in the world.

This goes beyond taxes.

Competitiveness is about how we build the foundations for tomorrow’s smart economy – a skills economy connected by smart infrastructure and global access.

We need to change how we educate our youth, enable trade with other markets and lay the infrastructure for our economy to ensure our future success.

Here’s how we can get there.

Sadly, Mr. McKay did not address the potential for eliminating the favoured position of Canada’s domestic banks which, protected from global competition by legal and regulatory walls, have established an extremely profitable oligopoly in Canada that sucks up a lot of the investment capital available in our country.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2018 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.