how do we get corporate canada to invest?

I am ignorant about a great many things, and, apart from a C+ in second-year macro at McGill, my ignorance of economics is almost complete. Which is just prefatory to saying that I didn’t understand Jim Stanford’s column in today’s Globe and Mail (again, behind the firewall). As I understand it, Stanford is suggesting that Canada’s ongoing productivity problem is to some extent a function of inadequate corporate investment in new technology and equipment. And that failure comes at a time when “corporate coffers are bursting”:

Some of this largesse has been siphoned off to fat dividends; some has been invested overseas. But lots of it just sits there. Canadian businesses currently sit on $280-billion worth of cash, foreign currency, and short-term paper.

Stanford suggests doing one of two things: Reinstating 7 percentage points worth of federal corporate income taxes (to spend on public capital investment, like hospitals and colleges) or, alternatively, forcing corporations to spend these excess profits on productivity-enhancing investment. “Either way,” he writes, “that money must be put in motion. Corporations have no right to pile up hoards of idle cash… If they’re not going to invest, let someone else do it for them.” I won’t pretend to understand the ins-and-outs of corporate taxation and its relationship to productivity, innovation, public-sector investment, or anything else. Hell, I couldn’t even find the door. But what I’d like to know is, what does Stanford mean when he says that the money “just sits there”? Obviously, some money does just “sit there.” The money under my couch just sits there, playing no useful economic role on either the consumption or investment side. Money that is literally socked away is no good either. But I assume that Canadian corporations aren’t literally sitting on piles of cash, Scrooge McDuck-style. And I remember being taught, in grade 12 I guess, that savings was a form of investment, because when you put cash in the bank, the bank the loans it to someone who spends it on whatever they see fit, from buying a new car to starting a new business. So my naïve question is, what is happening to that $280 billion that Stanford says “just sits there”? Is it really not being invested, or is it just being invested in the wrong things? If it is really just sitting there, is taxing it back the best way of putting it in motion? If it is being invested in the wrong things, why is that? More broadly, if Stanford is right, why is Corporate Canada sitting on so much money, instead of investing it in productivity-enhancing equipment and technology?