Finance Committee on Feb. 16th, 2016

[Daniel Kelly]

Yes.

[Robert-Falcon Ouellette, Liberal, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

That's just what I wanted to ensure, because it sounded like there are people who are trying to hide money from the state, and I believe that shouldn't be the case. Thank you. That cleared it up for me. I really appreciate that.

The final one is for Hans Marotte. I don't have a lot of time left, but on the EI plan, it sounds to me like the government in the past has been trying to reduce the number of people who have access to employment insurance, reducing the numbers. With computer technology today, by using the Internet, by people having to fill out those forms themselves for employment insurance, I fail to understand why it would take more than a simple couple of days to process these applications. When you're on unemployment insurance, you have to make big decisions for your family. You have to pay that mortgage. You have to pay those car payments. You have to pay your children's hockey registration, and all these things you're doing in trying to support your family. If you can't do it, what are you going to do?

I have two seconds.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Ouellette, you'd better get to it.

[Robert-Falcon Ouellette, Liberal, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Do you believe the government should actually be making this a more efficient process with our computer systems, and more productive?

[Hans Marotte]

The means are there, clearly. Where there is a will, there is a way. I was in a car accident a month ago. A week later, my car was fixed and running again; and it is just metal. But when someone loses their job, that person can no longer pay the rent, or feed their children, or purchase a bus ticket to go to an employment centre where he can look for work. Where there's a will, there's a way.

I have been with the Mouvement action-chômage de Montréal for 25 years. I know that over all of those years, this has never been a priority. If a government really wants to see to it that people receive their benefit cheque within a reasonable period, that can be done very quickly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. MacGregor, we'll go a little over time, but we'll give you three minutes. Go ahead.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to speak today.

My question is for Ms. Gray. I'm Alistair MacGregor. I am pleased to sit as the NDP's critic for seniors' issues. I certainly hope I can continue a relationship with your organization.

The Broadbent Institute just released a report that shows the planned increase in guaranteed income supplement should remove about 85,000 seniors from the poverty rolls. While that is a commendable action, it's still going to leave about 634,000 in poverty.

It also has a statistic that shows that the overall median value of retirement assets is about $3,000 for those aged 55 to 64. I know that very much reflects the constituents in my riding. I'm from Vancouver Island. We have a lot of people earning in the neighbourhood of $30,000 to $50,000. Once all the bills are paid, it does not leave a lot left over to save. With the population of seniors set to increase dramatically over the next 20 years, I think this problem is only going to exacerbate itself if we don't take some corrective action.

I heard that a big issue for seniors is health care. I'm a big subscriber to the social determinants of health. I believe that if we don't take actions to address poverty.... We know those who live with lower incomes have poorer health overall. I certainly saw that a lot. I used to work as a constituency assistant to Jean Crowder. I met lots of low-income seniors who had to supplement their diet with a box of crackers just to make it through the month. It really makes you quite emotional when you see it up close and personal. It makes you realize that the stuff we do here in Ottawa has real effects out there.

I was just wondering. Has CARP as an organization done any studies or talked to its members about the social determinants of health? Could you offer some feedback to me on the best way forward on that?

[Janet Gray]

Sure. It's a big question. We know that health care issues are changing as the demographic is aging, so it is foremost on our list as well.

There are gaps people are falling through. That goes to the national pharmacare program we're talking about. It goes to making sure that the Canada Health Act is indeed country-wide and accessible to everyone. One current thing that's popped up on our radar has been dental care. Dental care is not covered in the national health care act. It's often an emergency situation that takes them into the hospital setting. There's a lot of interest around that, on an advocacy role also.

We know there are certain age gaps where they fall between the cracks. In Ontario, specifically, after the age of 65, their drugs are paid for and there's a copayment. Their drugs are cheaper on the other side of 65 than they are on this side of 65.

Yes, there are absolutely a lot of issues and I'd love to talk to you more about them.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We'll have to thank you both. On behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank all of the witnesses. There's been a lot of good information and interesting exchanges.

The committee will suspend for about five minutes. We have to get the video conferences geared up and there are some technical things to deal with.

Thank you one and all. The meeting is suspended for five minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Could we come to order, please?

We will have a PowerPoint during this panel at some point. We also have two mayors by video conference.

We'll start with Mr. Macdonald, from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

You have five minutes. At five minutes I'll cut you off.

[David Macdonald, Senior Economist, National Office, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives]

Yes, sir.

Thanks so much to the committee for the invitation today.

I'd like to focus my remarks today on some important macroeconomic phenomena instead of specific policy questions.

I think that we're living through a transformative moment in Canada. We're witnessing the end of monetary policy and the rise of fiscal policy.

Historically, to manage recessions, the Bank of Canada would lower interest rates, thus encouraging households to take out a loan or a mortgage to build, buy, or renovate their house, also encouraging businesses to take out a loan to improve their operations. For instance, during the great recession the Bank dropped interest rates and households ran a $176-billion deficit in 2009 alone. By comparison, the federal government ran only a $55-billion deficit, and the provinces, a $26-billion deficit.

While federal government cutbacks have since led to balanced books, households continued running annual deficits of $60 billion to $80 billion a year between 2009 and today. In fact, households were the heroes of post-crash growth in Canada. The cost, of course, was historically high household debt, but the payoff was much higher GDP growth.

As the federal government cut back, the provinces also continued their deficits. Their major programs, such as health care and education, can't be cut back in the same way. This actually led to a historic crossing in 2015, with provinces now holding more debt than the federal government for the first time in Canadian history. At the end of 2009 and the financial crisis, the Bank of Canada's overnight rate approached zero, effectively ending their ability to spur growth by encouraging more debt. Going forward, Canada is therefore limited in where we can see growth come from.

Slow growth didn't start in 2015. We have been experiencing slow growth since 2010. All estimates are that this will continue, likely mixed with technical recessions, for the foreseeable future. We continue to import more than we export, a trend started following the 2009 crisis, thereby reducing our GDP growth every year. The corporate sector actually has strong balance sheets and continues to hoard record amounts of cash, which now exceeds the value of our national debt. But corporate contributions to GDP, through new capital spending in particular, have been devastated by the oil price rout.

This leaves the federal government as a key engine for future growth. Without more involvement, specifically deficit-financed involvement, slow growth and technical recessions are the prediction for the future of Canada for the coming years.

But there is significant room to grow. The federal government is presently at its lowest share of total expenditures to GDP of any time since 1939 prior to the Second World War. Put another way, the federal government spends less as a share of the economy than it did prior to the implementation of the Canada pension plan and modern old age security, prior to employment insurance, and prior to universal health care. The federal debt-to-GDP ratio, Canada's relative debt ratio, is at its lowest point since 1980. We have the lowest federal debt-to-GDP ratio by a long shot in the G8, and it has been falling.

While Canada is lowering its debt-to-GDP ratio, bond markets are desperate for more debt, not less debt. They can't get enough Canadian debt. They are, in fact, so desperate that they are willing to lose money on our bonds after inflation, with our five-to-ten-year bond yield now under 1%. They are desperate for the federal government to run larger deficits to create more low-risk Canadian government debt.

To provide some scale, if we were to take, let's say, a $25-billion deficit—I think that is at the high end of expectations this year—one might say that this may seem large. It certainly is large for an individual or a company, but we need to consider this in relative comparison to the Canadian economy, which is worth $2 trillion today, and in comparison it's actually quite a small amount. In fact, a $25-billion deficit would be smaller than any deficit on a relative basis run between 1970 and 1995. In fact, we could run a deficit of $25 billion forever and the debt-to-GDP ratio would remain constant as the economy grows. In fact, the larger the federal deficit, the larger our corporate profits and the larger the household surplus, that is to say, households paying down their debts.

It's not just deficit size that's important; it's also what it finances. Deficit financing tax cuts for rich Canadians, for instance, would be much less effective at job creation and GDP growth. Deficit financing of social programs and infrastructure, on the other hand, would be much more effective for GDP, jobs, and growth.

There may be delays, clearly, in infrastructure spending and social program set-up, but slow growth isn't going anywhere. We have plenty of time to implement those programs and reap the benefits in terms of increased GDP.

For more details, I hope you'll read our alternative federal budget, which will come out in early March.

Let me thank you and I'll wrap up there. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, Mr. Macdonald. You're right on the money, right on the time.

We now have Mr. Everson, with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

By the way, thank you all for coming in on short notice. We appreciate it. I didn't mention that at the beginning.

Mr. Everson.

[Warren Everson, Senior Vice-President, Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members. Thank you for inviting us here today.

We submitted a written submission to the committee, and it had at least 10 significant issues in it. I don't propose going through all of them, certainly not in five minutes. Let me speak about two that we think are of pre-eminent importance.

Regarding the first, you'll have heard a lot from witnesses about a skilled workforce. I can't say how often this issue comes up in our normal work. Employers of all kinds are constantly speaking to us about the problems in finding skilled workers. No matter what sector you're in—high tech, natural resources, the services sector—the human resource problem is very much with us.

To the credit of the current government, in its election campaign and since, it's had ambitious ideas and laid out some plans and initiatives that we're very interested in. We congratulate you for taking them on and we'll pledge the support of the membership of the Chamber of Commerce to all of the heterodox ideas that are being talked about with regard to internships and various other mechanisms to transition people from education into employment.

It's a maddening thing that Canada has one of the highest-educated populations in the world, but we have an extremely long lag time for young people before they enter the job market, even if they have a very good degree. All of the tools for work-enabled learning are worth exploring. As I said, it's to the government's credit that you're taking that on.

On a less positive tone, the election came along in the middle of a huge reform in Canada's immigration system. It was really the largest reform that had been undertaken in decades, with the creation of something called the express entry system. I can sum it up by simply saying that whereas in the past, our governmental bureaucracy reviewed the job needs of the economy and then calibrated the immigration system accordingly, under the express entry system the government sought to ask the economy itself, asking employers what they would like, what they need, and then introduced those factors to the immigration stream.

Unfortunately, in the frenzy of the politics around temporary foreign workers the government found itself actually cracking down a little bit, so that we now have the express entry system limping along, trying to come into being, but still having oversight and a lot of fairly heavy government restraint on the use of workers coming in as immigrants. Of course, we also have a lot of unfinished business with regard to temporary foreign workers.

I personally know of major investments, some of the largest investments in Canadian history, that are hesitating today because of uncertainty with regard to their ability to get workers and their ability to source workers from outside of Canada if they can't find the necessary skills in Canada in short order. We believe that Canada is bleeding from a wound that we've inflicted upon ourselves.

Very quickly, because I know your time is short, I want to also talk about the other major preoccupation that we have, which is infrastructure. The government is talking about major programs in infrastructure. We're very strongly supportive of that. Infrastructure is a highly virtuous investment in our opinion. Not only do you get an excellent multiplier for the investment—I think I used 1.7 or 1.75—but you also get a legacy of improved facilities that are usually environmentally beneficial, and there's certainly a quality-of-life benefit.

The trick, however, is to make sure those investments are economically empowering. There's a great demand on you for various social investments. I'm not for one minute going to say that many of them are not worth making; however, with the kind of money we're talking about, we should be capable of megaprojects. The kind of money that will be talked about in the budget, that was talked about in the campaign, is nation changing. It's new power from British Columbia into Alberta to get out of coal-fired plants. It's significant reduction in congestion in the two most congested cities in Canada. It's a whole series of efficiencies to allow exporters to get to the markets and make us all wealthy. So we're very strong supporters of that.

I would also say that infrastructure is extremely egalitarian. It is true that it benefits big business. It is also true that it benefits ordinary workers. If you're fixing furnaces and you cannot get around to various jobs around Toronto because you're spending your time in traffic, you're harmed. If you're a new arrival in Canada driving a taxi cab and you cannot get around to the jobs, you're harmed as much as the president of a major corporation.

We strongly support that, but we do think it needs a considerable amount of rigour in the application of the monies to ensure that.... Even $60 billion can be frittered away.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Pedersen, with the Canadian Climate Forum, please go ahead.

[Thomas Pedersen, Chair, Canadian Climate Forum]

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone.

Thank you very much, honourable chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to address you this evening. I will be making a PowerPoint presentation.

This is what's at stake. This is our home. All that separates us from the inhospitable infinity of space is a very thin layer of atmosphere that surrounds the blue dot we call our home.

We're changing the composition of that thin veneer. We're changing it dramatically. The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is rising at a rate unparalleled in the history of the planet, to the very best of our knowledge. The impacts of that are extraordinary and severe. You can see that in the projected temperature change by the end of the century of many, many degrees across the planet. Associated with that, we're seeing increased droughts, increased deluges, rising sea levels, loss of our alpine glaciers, the retreating Greenland ice sheet, and so on. We all know all about these impacts.

In December, Canada and 195 other countries made a commitment to the rest of the world to reduce our level of greenhouse gases to that thin veneer that separates us from space to 30% below 2005 levels by the year 2030. Minister McKenna has said that's just the beginning. That's a floor. That's not a firm target. It's a floor. We need to do even better than that.

Our challenge is how we will get there. We have a big gap, a big gulf, in this country now. In 2012 the previous government closed the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, which was contributing $11 million a year in direct support of climate research in this country. In 2013 the previous government closed the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which was spending $5.5 million a year on largely economically oriented research in support of environmental stewardship in Canada.

About that time, the board of directors of the climate foundation said we can't let this issue fade away. We created the Canadian Climate Forum, dedicated toward promoting constructive dialogue on how Canada can face the climate challenge. We created that about three years ago. We're a very active organization based here in Ottawa.

It's not enough. We need to go further now. The challenge for this country lies right in front of us. What we are proposing here tonight is that we create in this country the “Canadian climate council”. This would be a multidisciplinary, very broad body that would draw on the talent pools across the nation to focus on policy, very firmly on policy development, and we would take into account science, engineering, entrepreneurship, health, and first nations—all of the things we need to be looking at in terms of the multidisciplinary matrix that is so important to us.

As the Canadian Climate Forum, we've had meetings now with over 20 senior bureaucrats in over 12 ministries in the last several weeks. They have delivered to us a common message. I'm going to read you one quotation from an assistant deputy minister, who shall remain nameless, who said, “While we should be able to convene across departments on the climate change file, we have not done a good job of it, nor are we likely to.”

What we're proposing is a national council that would pull together all of the different threads, all of the different constituencies, take full advantage of our university sector and our government research labs, our provincial government research labs, NGOs, and others to sit around a common table and deal with a set of common questions, provided by the federal government, that would allow us as a nation to directly address the climate change challenge.

We have a model. This is not something new. The model is called the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. It's been in existence since 2008 in British Columbia. It was funded by a $90-million endowment from the Gordon Campbell government of the day. The institute lives off the interest from that endowment. It's policy focused. It's multidisciplinary. It's working on five major topics of critical importance to British Columbia: transportation futures; energy efficiency in buildings; how we can make maximum societal value from our natural gas resources; how we can integrate the western Canadian electrical grid, which my colleague here mentioned earlier; and we are politically independent. Gordon Campbell looked me right in the eye and told me this two years ago. He said, “Tom, we gave you an endowment because you must be politically independent.”

What we are proposing tonight is essentially taking the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions model and scaling it nationally. We have put in a submission to your committee, to the Minister of Finance, that would allow us to do that, and we ask for your support.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, Mr. Pedersen.

From the Cement Association of Canada, we have Mr. McSweeney.

[Michael McSweeney, President and Chief Executive Officer, Cement Association of Canada]

Thank you very much.

Let me be direct. Cement and concrete are a sustainable and critical component to rebuilding and developing Canada’s infrastructure. Durable, safe, energy efficient, and resilient in the face of diverse and changing climate, cement and concrete are a key building material used in virtually all above and below ground infrastructure and building projects.

It is critically important for governments to make annual investments in our country’s infrastructure, and I'd like to applaud the new government for making significant commitments to long-term infrastructure investments. True partnership and co-operation is required to address the infrastructure deficit, and Canada’s cement producers wish to be full partners with all levels of government in the renewal and modernization of Canada’s infrastructure.

What’s different now from my previous appearances before this committee is that the Government of Canada—and governments globally—has committed to transition to low-carbon economies, which will both mitigate climate change and prepare our communities for the changes we are already experiencing. Within a year, the vast majority of the Canadian economy will include a price on carbon and the federal government has committed to complementing these provincial initiatives with a national pricing strategy.

Fighting climate change is not for the faint of heart, especially for you politicians. It will require step change. It will require massive regulation if we are to meet the goals adopted at COP21.

As a northern climate, Canada’s infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Canada needs and must continue to focus on resilient forms of construction. We are also faced with significant maintenance backlogs. Governments have traditionally focused on short-term fixes to infrastructure deficiencies rather than true infrastructure renewal and modernization, thus leading to an increased tax burden, and ultimately, increased greenhouse gases.

If we are committed to reducing greenhouse gases from the built environment and minimizing long-term maintenance costs, government needs to move beyond the initial cost decision and embrace a cradle-to-cradle perspective. Governments should consider a project’s total service life and total cost of ownership. For example, the vast majority of a building’s energy consumption and contribution to greenhouse gases takes place after it is built, so infrastructure projects are long-lived assets and what we do or don’t do to minimize greenhouse gas emissions today is locking the potential for GHG reductions in the future.

The optimum solution for any construction project, both from a cost and environmental point of view, can only be determined through a complete life cycle analysis. These impacts may not be apparent if the initial costs and environmental burdens are inappropriately weighed in the evaluation. Life cycle studies demonstrate that the initial embodied energy of a typical building in Canada seldom exceeds 10% of the overall energy or CO2 emissions associated with the project's life. Most importantly from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective is the energy performance of the project over its total service life. This factor has shown itself to be a major driver in the environmental performance of a project and of reducing total operational costs and total cost of ownership, so in light of these findings, it's obvious the focus promoted by some industries on only the initial carbon profile of building products themselves is therefore not a fully transparent position and overlooks the largest potential greenhouse gas reductions.

That's why we are recommending that any infrastructure investment should mandate full life-cycle cost assessment screening. As my colleague talked about earlier, let's spend the money properly. We need to ensure that all new projects contribute to achieving Canada’s CO2 reduction objectives. It's important that every decision government takes be seen through the climate change lens.

We take sustainability seriously. We've reduced our CO2 emissions by 15% over the past 20 years and our new cement, called Contempra, will decrease CO2 emissions by a further 10%. This new cement is a direct result of the industry’s commitment to proactively improve its environmental footprint. By replacing general-use cement and mandating—having the government mandate the use of Contempra cement on public infrastructure across Canada—governments can reduce CO2 emissions by almost one megatonne per year with this small change. This is the equivalent of taking 172,000 cars off the road each year, or planting 23 million trees annually.

It's just one of the many ways our industry can help governments meet their climate change objectives.

In conclusion, when it comes to investments in durable, safe, energy-efficient, and resilient infrastructure, we'd like the government to truly adopt the philosophy of build it once, build it right, build it to last, and if I can be self-serving, build it with concrete.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Michael McSweeney]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

That makes your point in your closing, doesn't it, Mr. McSweeney?

From the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, Ms. Blackstock, the floor is yours.

[Dr. Cindy Blackstock, Executive Director, First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada]

On January 26, 2016, the conscience of the nation was shaken. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a ruling saying that the federal government of Canada was racially discriminating against 163,000 innocent children in this country by providing them fewer child and family services and less access to all other public services enjoyed by other children because of who they are and where they live.

Sadly this racial discrimination, this fiscal policy, has been with us since Confederation. As the evidence filed by government officials at the tribunal showed, it's not restricted to first nations child and family services, nor is it restricted to access to health care. We saw admissions in those federal documents that were never meant to be seen by the public: that first nations children are denied equal opportunity to an education; they're denied an equal opportunity to drink a clean glass of water; they're denied an equal opportunity to live in a house that won't make them sick.

When we looked at one of the pieces of evidence that came forward, which admitted the underfunding in child and family services, it showed how the department was trying to make up for those shortfalls. One of the slides that will be in your report shows that the infrastructure budget for first nations communities, according to the department's only estimates, falls $8.2 billion short of what it should be, yet the federal government was transferring $0.5 billion, over six years. Money that should have been spent on water and schools was being transferred to cover the shortfalls in this program, and it was not covering the shortfalls in child and family services.

What does it mean for kids when racial discrimination is being used as a criterion for fiscal policy by government? Between the years 1989 and 2012, first nations children on reserve and in the Yukon spent 66 million nights away from their families. Evidence before the tribunal showed little kids, four-year-old little kids, being denied equipment so that they could breathe because the federal government couldn't figure out a way to match the service that would have been provided to those little kids if they were non-aboriginal.

A non-aboriginal child told me that discrimination is when the government doesn't think you're worth the money. What would it feel like if you weren't worth the money, and what would it feel like if you were the parent of a child who is not worth the money? No amount of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is going to give your child that breathing machine. You have to rely on the conscience of the nation, of the people who were elected, to understand that although governments have to make hard choices in hard economic times, there are some things that are sacred and should never be traded off, and one of them is the childhood of the nation's children. There are criteria this Parliament and this government should never use as sorting mechanisms to make those hard decisions, and one of those is racial discrimination. An uncomfortable reality is that the government has been using racial discrimination against children.

And it's not because you're broke. The KidsRights Index, a prestigious worldwide ranking system for how well governments are doing for their children proportionate to their wealth, found this last year—it was released on Canada Day incidentally—that we ranked 57th in the world. In a subindex that looks specifically at legislation and budgets, Canadian governments ranked 134th in the world, right next to Uzbekistan. Our economy, as troubled as it is, is doing far better than Canadian children are and far better than first nations children are.

You know, even if my plea doesn't survive the ethical or moral analysis that I'm asking you to do bearing in mind that racial discrimination against kids is not okay, it can never survive the economic analysis either, because the very best stimulus for any government is not other than investing in children. The World Health Organization says that for every dollar you spend here on children, you save $20 U.S. down the line, which means about 30 bucks for us. Fail to spend that money and not only do you corrupt the soul of the nation but you leave little kids like Kennedy out.

There's a little girl right now in Alberta who had an ocular tumour. That would scare most parents in this room. Thankfully the surgeon was able to save her sight, but she required some specialized eye drops so that it would heal properly. The federal government did not want to give her the eye drops she needed, which were prescribed by her pediatric surgeon. The federal government said to use Visine instead. This little girl requires orthodontic treatment too. Without it, two pediatric orthodontists have said that she may not be able to talk, she may not be able to eat, and she will be in chronic pain. It costs $8,000 for the treatment, and if she doesn't get it, she's going to require 20,000 dollars' worth of surgery.

Are we really at such hard economic times and such polluted moral times in the country that we're going to say to Kennedy, “No, you're not worth the money”? We have on our website solutions for addressing that child welfare complaint. The tribunal made it clear that the Canadian government knew about the inequality, knew about the harms to kids, and has the solutions to fix it. You need to fix it in child welfare, but you need to fix it here in these committees too, and never allow race and discrimination against children to ever be permissible in your decision-making with this government, or any to follow.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, Ms. Blackstock. The document you referred to will be translated and distributed.

Now, let's turn to the mayors and the video conference. Mayor Forest and Mayor Garon, go ahead.

[Éric Forest, Mayor, City of Rimouski]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We bring greetings from the Lower St. Lawrence. It is snowing where you are, and it is raining here.

We want to intervene briefly by stating that the municipalities are important partners for the government, in the economic recovery. The objective of our intervention today is that we would like to see the government take into account the priorities of municipalities, which are local governments.

Since 2008, municipalities everywhere in Canada have contributed to the recovery, particularly through the Building Canada Fund. In Quebec alone, between 2008 and 2014, we contributed over $30 billion that enabled the creation of 220,000 jobs yearly. These people pay taxes and they are consumers. They contribute to Canada's prosperity.

We mostly invested in aqueduct and sewer infrastructure programs. Today, we are not asking for a budgetary envelope, but we are asking that our priorities be respected.

We want to submit to you two examples of projects that would be ready to start tomorrow morning in the context of an agreement with the Building Canada Fund, particularly for small communities or large projects. In Rimouski, there is a project to build two Olympic-size skating rinks, one in keeping with North American standards and another with international standards, as well as two reservoirs, one of 25 metres. This is a $35-million project that is greatly needed by the community. The project was developed in partnership with the University of Quebec in Rimouski. That said, in the context of globalization, and faced with a demographic challenge, we have to offer quality services in order to attract new families to our area who will take over our organizations and businesses.

We will provide a brief overview of the situation. May I introduce Gilles Garon, Mayor of Témiscouata-sur-le-Lac, who also has a project to present that is a key project for his community.

[Gilles Garon, Mayor, City of Témiscouata-sur-le-Lac]

Thank you.

Good morning, members of the committee.

I agree with Éric. Municipalities as a whole share this vision.

We elected representatives often inherit situations from the past, but we nevertheless have the responsibility of preparing the heritage of tomorrow. In our municipalities we sometimes experience situations that are quite difficult.

I'll give you an example. Here in Témiscouata-sur-le-Lac, in 2002, a factory burned down which was not rebuilt; this caused the loss of 450 jobs. We had to deal with that, as well as with municipal budget cuts of 18%. Despite all of that, we had to continue to invest in our aqueduct infrastructure, and that is what we did.

People in our milieu decided to act. We created a municipal association with our neighbour. People voted in favour of that initiative. We are continuing to develop. Today, we are building our regional arena, which has to be upgraded. This is an $8-million construction project.

We want this project to generate leverage and to be a sort of regional event hub to attract private investment to the region. Our objective is to create a new economy, to create at least 50 jobs, and, in terms of the regional economy, to help all of the businesses in the surrounding area. We want this to be an energy-efficient and very innovative building.

I would like to make one last point. You need to look at the whole issue of cellular telephony, connectivity and broadband technology in the regions. That is important because the service is clearly deficient in our area.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, gentlemen. You're a minute under time. We're making great progress.

I'll start the round of questioning, and we'll reduce it to six minutes again.

We'll start with Ms. O'Connell.