Newmarket, Ontario
28 November 2013
Good day, everyone.
First of all, I want to begin by thanking everyone who’s joined us today, especially Matt and Mike and all the people, the employees here from Canadian Plastics Group, really thank you for hosting us today.
This is the first of our official meetings across the country, kind of the kick-off of what will be literally hundreds of meetings that will be held by myself, our Ministers, Members of Parliament and others on the pre-budget consultations.
Really preparing the groundwork for our Economic Action Plan for 2014.
So as we go forward, obviously you can imagine we will continue to have as our focus jobs, growth and long-term prosperity.
Canada continues to do reasonably well.
I know Canadians feel reasonably good but we are continuing to be living in a very uncertain global economy.
So we need to do everything we can to continue to focus on the economy, continue to build opportunity and secure our strength for the longer term.
We’ll be hearing a range of idea here from participants and elsewhere across the country.
Obviously, friends, all this will be in the context of our determination to balance the budget over the next couple of years and make sure that our already advantageous fiscal position really is secured for the very long term.
It’s one of many advantages we have over our competitors and one that we want to retain.
Today I have with me representatives principally of independent business of the manufacturing sector.
Small and medium sized business in this country, you know, is the overwhelming source of innovation and of job creation.
And so this is an opportunity in the Newmarket area to hear that perspective on our economy.
I want to thank Lois Brown, Member of Parliament, for setting this up and C.S. Leung, who’s joined us from Toronto for this, my colleagues who have joined us for this discussion.
So thanks, everybody.
I look forward to hearing your views.
