A new report on Canada’s competitiveness is delivering a stark assessment on how the economy is losing its edge on the global stage, pointing to regulatory hurdles and weak business investment as the main challenges.

The report – which will be released Tuesday and was conducted by Deloitte and the Business Council of Canada – notes how Canada has tumbled on the World Bank’s 2019 Ease of Doing Business index to 22nd today from fourth place in 2006 amid regulatory challenges.

According to the World Bank, it currently takes 249 days to obtain a warehouse permit in Canada, or 168 more than the 81 days it would take in the United States.

“The challenge is that we aren’t nimble,” said Craig Alexander, partner and chief economist with Deloitte, in an interview with BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman and Amber Kanwar Monday.

“We need sound regulation, we do. But … you want the public interest served with the least economic disruption. Are you telling me we actually can’t reduce the number of days to get approval for a warehouse relative to other peer nations?”

The report also notes the chilling effect of several high-profile, landmark infrastructure investments in the resources sector that have been delayed or rejected as a result of complex regulatory approval processes in Canada.

“Regardless of the size of the proposed investment, unnecessarily long regulatory processes can cause uncertainty and erode business confidence in Canada,” the report said.

In the latest setback for Canada’s resources industry, Enbridge Inc. announced Friday that its expansion of its Line 3 conduit will be delayed for about one year. Meanwhile, the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion – which the federal government bought from Kinder Morgan Inc. last year for $4.5 billion to save it from cancellation – has been stalled amid legal challenges.

The report said that another key factor dragging on Canadian business competitiveness is underinvestment in machinery and equipment. It points out how Canadian firms’ private gross fixed capital spending – a measure of the overall investment in physical assets within an economy – as a share of GDP was the second-lowest among peer nations at 10.8 per cent in 2017, and has been persistently lower than its peers such as South Korea, Australia and Sweden since 2008.

“While the causes of low levels of investment may vary by sector, the consequences to the Canadian economy are clear,” the report said.

The report is based on an analysis of more than 500 data points compared to 12 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, South Korea, Germany, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.