Productivity has to do with the number of outputs and the labour and the hours worked. If you have a low dollar, you can improve your productivity by having people working more, or by having more people working.
When you are in an environment where the dollar is high and you need to control your costs, having more employees might not be the best cost-efficient way to make more outputs. You need to look at innovations or new machinery that will allow you to have the same production, maybe with fewer hours worked, or more production with the same number of hours worked. It's from this perspective....
Replacing old machinery is a way to improve productivity, but as I said before, if you look at what type of machinery you want to focus on, definitely the information and communication technology type of equipment.... All the reports I've read point to that kind of equipment, which accounts for about 50% of the productivity gap between Canada and the U.S.
Maybe there's a way even beyond the ACCA, for all types of machinery and processing, to keep the focus on these kinds of machines, because new innovation in our sector is about automation and greater use of a computerized process of manufacturing.