Hangzhou, China - 7 November 2014
Well, thank you very much for that introduction, Dashan.
It's always great to see you.
Greetings to everybody.
I'd just like to begin by thanking our host here, Jack Ma, our host here at Alibaba for making this facility available to us.
We really appreciate the opportunity.
And greetings to all of my colleagues, Ministers and Members of Parliament who have come from Canada, and also to all of you.
Welcome to all the Canadian business people who have joined us here today.
I'd just like to maybe begin by walking us through if I could just a few slides, a few PowerPoint slides on really the state of the Canadian economy and kind of some of the things we're doing here and how it may relate to what Alibaba does and I know Jack will speak at greater length after that.
First of all, I guess you'll see the slides on the far screens.
First of all, just general overview about the Canadian economy for those of you who are not familiar.
Canada is a unique country.
It's not the largest country in the world, but we have one of the most diversified economies, everything from large-scale production of energy and natural resources through to the highest tech industries.
We also have we believe a very unique society, two official languages and a cultural environment that is welcoming and open to people from all parts of the world.
We've come through as a developed country, the period of the global recession pretty well.
We were one of the last developed countries to go into recession.
We were in it relatively shortly and we've come out of it relatively strongly.
Canadian job creation has been very strong, if you look at the period shown on the slide since our Government took office in 2006, we have had clearly superior job creation performance to other developed economies.
I also want to note that if you look at those jobs, and we're talking here particularly since the end of the recession of 1.2 million, over 1.2 million net new jobs.
They're overwhelmingly full-time, high-paying private sector jobs.
This has helped to underscore strong income growth in Canada over the last several years, much stronger than in the other G-7 major developed economies.
A big reason we think this has happened is because we've made it our business in our country with the cooperation of many of our provinces to create a good, stable, low-tax environment for Canadian business.
When we took office we had one of the highest tax rates among the major developed economies.
Today we have the lowest, lower than the OECD average.
And for small businesses, these numbers are very significant.
You see the example on the screen of a company with about $500,000 taxable income is now paying about a third less than it did when we came to office.
I also want to underscore that this low-tax environment we've established in Canada is sustainable because it's underpinned by strong fiscal fundamentals.
As you can see we've been coming out of our recessionary deficit very quickly.
We're projecting a very small deficit this year, $2.9 billion.
That's roughly 0.1 per cent of GDP so it's really insignificant and we move into surplus in the years to come.
Also these small deficits, as they are, are adding to a debt level that is already very low.
We have a debt level that's about half the G-7 average.
We've made it our business as a government to focus on all the things we need to do to create growth and development for the long term.
You see the list of the things that we're focused on there, ranging from development of the labour market through skills and immigration to the creation of better venture capital.
I could list them all: research, development and innovation plans.
But the one I want to talk about the most is really on the trade front.
We've made it our business as a government to get Canada open and connected to the global trading system.
When we came to office, in spite of the fact Canada's always been a relatively small open trading economy, we had the fewest trade agreements of any significant trading country in the world.
Trade agreements with only five countries.
We now have agreements with 43 that's going to give us tariff-free access to over half of the global economy including all of North America and Europe.
And as you can see, with other trade negotiations we have under way, we'll push that number up to about two-thirds in the years to come.
I just want to focus a moment about how we've grown our trade with China.
It has been growing considerably.
There's been a big imbalance in that in terms of our imports versus our exports.
But over the last several years we've seen imports and exports rising at about the same rate.
We've seen about $10 billion growth in each over the past four years.
Looking specifically at exports to China, these have grown from about $10 billion, $11 billion in 2009 to $20 billion in 2013.
We expect that to hit $30 billion, 2016; $40 billion, 2018.
Obviously this opens tremendous opportunities.
Where that's occurred obviously growth is not even, but you can see that overall in key Canadian sectors, particularly some of the primary sectors, both food, mineral, those kinds of areas due to the work of Trade Minister Fast, Agriculture Minister Ritz, we've seen some pretty steady growth, pretty not just steady, some pretty spectacular growth in some of those sectors.
What we really want to emphasize today and I know Jack is going to want to talk about it at greater length is the longer-term opportunities that really exist here for our business sectors.
And that is because a growing and prosperous middle class in China is one of the dominant features of the 21st century economy.
Household incomes are forecast to triple here over the next 15 years by the time we hit 2020.
By 2030 it's projected there's going to be 1.1 billion Chinese middle class consumers.
That means there will be enormous markets for things like very high-quality advanced Canadian food and consumer products to the extent that has been frankly inconceivable in the past.
Things like demand for meat.
Demand for meat in China projected to grow by some 60 per cent over the next 15 years.
Forty per cent of global energy demand is going to be in China.
And obviously Canada's one of the biggest energy producers in the world.
Now in the area – Jack of course specializes in e-commerce – Jack's going to talk a little bit about this.
The world, the business world that has opened up in this country is not just new and explosive but it is fairly unique, fairly different than what we've seen in other parts of the world because the consumer market here really is founded principally on e-commerce.
Sixty-four per cent of sales, of commercial sales here in China are through the phenomenon of e-commerce whereas in North America and Canada, where it's obviously grown enormously, it's still only 14 per cent.
And of course I know what's of interest to the Canada business community, the Chamber of Commerce.
Because of the nature of this growth and these sales, there are opportunities for small- and medium-size businesses that you would not have seen in traditional trade that obviously has often in the past been dominated by large-scale multinational corporations.
I said I was going to be brief.
The point I want to make in all of this, and both because of the opportunities here, but also because of the strong performance of the Canadian economy, we as Canadians by better connecting here at all levels of business have opportunity to create a lot more jobs, better opportunities and much greater prosperity, not just for Canadian businesses, workers and consumers, but ultimately as well for the Chinese consumers who also can benefit from what we have to offer in our country.
So thank you for your attention and I look forward to Jack's presentation.
