Report blasts Canada's low productivity

A new report from the Certified General Accountants Association of Canada says Canada must stimulate innovation by streamlining, reducing and simplifying regulations surrounding public-private partnerships between industry and universities. Entitled Fading Productivity: Making Sense of Canada's Productivity Gap, the report says Canada ranked 16th in its global competitiveness index, down from 9th in 2002. It attributes the decline to low rates of capital investment, weak investment in higher education, poor quality of high school math and science education, a reduction in employer-supported job training, barriers to public/private partnerships, restrictive government market policies and the cost of regulatory compliance. (www.cga.org/canada)....