Statistics Canada is out with it’s report on Foreign and Domestic Investment in Canada. You will be happy to know I have been wrong all alone and Jeannot Volpe has been right. His little tax cuts have spurred massive foreign investment in New Brunswick over the past few years.
Gotcha!
Foreign and domestic investment in machinery, equipment and
non-residential construction by province (2004-2006 totals)
Let me tell you how to read the chart (sometimes my charts are not that readable). The first column shows the total foreign investment for the three year period (total). Don’t forget this is not new companies. Foreign-owned companies already in Canada are also on this list so presumably it’s a good indicator for the level of foreign investment in the country/province.
The second column shows the total foreign investment per capita to adjust for size of province. Only little old PEI faired worse than New Brunswick. Interestingly, Nova Scotia received two and a half times more foreign investment than New Brunswick over the three years. Al Hogan may wish to refresh his recent editorial admonishing Nova Scotia to be more like New Brunswick and ‘follow Premier Lord’s lead’.
The third column shows the percentage of total foreign investment into Canada on a percentage basis by province. New Brunswick received less than 1% of the total foreign direct investment during the three year period while making up 2.3% of the total population.
Might I suggest that a first step here might be to at least attract our share of the national inward foreign investment flow?
Talking about ‘Ireland’ levels of investment is a bit grand considering these numbers, no?
If we were to attract ‘Ireland’ levels of investment, we would need to attract 7-8 times as much foreign investment as we do now. To put some hard numbers around that, instead of attracting around $450 million per year, we would have to attract $3 billion or more per year annually in foreign investment to get to that level.
What kind of ‘massive change’ would be required to get that puppy done?