Madam Speaker, we will now get back to being more relevant to the bill after those last comments.
I will be sharing my time with the member for Okanagan—Coquihalla. As a former treasurer of the province of Alberta, his input in the debate will be welcome and quite timely. I would also like to mention that the member for Port Moody—Westwood—Port Coquitlam, the Conservative Party critic on transportation, has done a tremendous job on this issue and certainly carries forward issues from British Columbia to this Parliament.
Bill C-68 was the number applied to another bill in another Parliament which dealt with the gun registry, so I hope this bill will be more successful than that one was. The summary of Bill C-68 states:
This enactment provides for a declaration of the Government of Canada's Pacific Gateway strategy and, in support of that strategy, creates Canada's Pacific Gateway Council, a new advisory council that will be tasked with providing advice and analysis to maximize the effectiveness of the Pacific gateway and its contribution to Canada's prosperity.
In another part of the bill it defines that and this is the part that concerns me. It says that the council will “provide policy advice and analysis to the public and private sectors regarding the best application of public and private sector interventions”.
Some people get very nervous when they hear that instead of the government listening to people in the private sector, it is going to start telling them what to do. We will see how this process goes. Two of the aspects are that subcommittees can be created, one for transportation and another one for opportunities.
For this Pacific gateway initiative to be successful those opportunities have to be developed very quickly. We need to have markets for the products that we are so blessed with in this country, our natural resources, our energy, the manufactured goods, the value added that goes on in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This gateway will deal mostly with those products but, of course, successful trade packages with the Asia-Pacific region will be good for all of Canada. That is what we have to remember.
A strong economy is good for all Canadians. It is good for the environment. It has been proven in the past that most environmental initiatives start when the economy is good. All of this comes together to create the importance of having a strong ability to move product. That is my concern.
In the bill the government talks about an expenditure of up to $590 million. The B.C. government has identified a need of $3.5 billion in B.C. alone. This bill is talking about just a fraction of what is needed. The list of items that the British Columbia government has already identified as priority areas to move goods to the coast is very extensive. It is not only on the coast itself, it is the infrastructure, the highways, the rail lines to get the product from the interior of our country to the west coast.
I am from Alberta and we have a problem now with our rail transportation system. It is clogged for the movement of grain. There is lots of grain on the Prairies, but it is of poor quality this year. The system is clogged to the point where there is nothing moving at the moment. We have made a concerted effort. We have talked a lot in the House about finding other markets outside North America. It would be easy to just go south of the border and try to find a market. We could put a product on a truck and send it south and sell it, but we have to find other markets. That includes having more than just the ability to put a product on a truck.
Of course we can truck goods to the west coast. We can send products by rail, or by air for smaller items, but the big bulk movement of freight is in dire need of upgrading. There has been some investment by the private sector and the railroads to improve the system, but looking at the big picture it is absolutely amazing what the potential for growth is on the Prairies and in British Columbia. The little bit of improvement that has taken place is not enough to open up the bottlenecks that slow the product down.
In my area of southern Alberta people want to put together an interior container port so they can put agricultural products and manufactured products on rail cars and ship them to the coast. Right now the easiest way to do that would be to send them south and get them on the east-west system that the U.S. has. We have to be very careful of that. We need to put the investment and the effort into the Canadian system so that we can truly use our own resources and our own people to ship goods.
We talk about the issue of value added a lot when it comes to agricultural products, about not selling raw grain, about turning it into a product that can be shipped. In order to do all of these things, we have to have timely transportation systems. In this day and age people do not want to keep large stocks on hand. They want just in time delivery. That compounds the problem. If we cannot get the product to where it needs to be, then that sale will not happen. We have seen this. We are trying to get product into India and other areas that coincide with certain aspects of their culture, and if it does not get there on time, then it is of no use. It is absolutely critical.
When one drives off the prairies and goes through the mountains and follows along the highway and railway systems, one can see that the rail lines are absolutely running at capacity. Some changes have to be made so that they either carry double the height of product or the tracks are twinned so that traffic can move both ways. The port can work both ways. We need it to ship our products into the world market, but we also use it to bring products in. To get products off the coast and into the interior and even into eastern Canada quickly is something that absolutely has to happen.
One of the issues that was brought forward earlier by our critic was that a lot of work has already been done, and in particular the British Columbia government has spent a lot of time and effort identifying the areas that need to be improved. What we see here today is just a fraction of what is needed. I think it is even less than 20% of the total dollar value that is needed to put the infrastructure into place to make the transportation system work to get goods to the coast which is what the government is talking about.
We are going to support this initiative because it takes a small step in the right direction, but a lot more is needed. With the system that is in place and the council that is going to be in place, hopefully there will be some more commitment from the government. For many years we have been calling for investment back into the transportation system from the money that is collected through the gas tax. It has to be dedicated to this type of thing. We know that some of this has been started already but it is all tied up with other requirements and municipalities have to able to access the money.
I mentioned inland terminals. People in the trucking industry are facing higher costs in running a truck down the highway because of the higher fuel costs. For every mile that a truck moves it costs somebody more money because of the cost of the fuel. Usually it is the end user who pays. That would be the consumer. Consumer goods cost more.
Everything has to be made as efficient as possible. The highways have to be such that large quantities of goods move with very little interruption. A serious investment needs to be put into the rail lines. That probably is the best way to move large quantities and large tonnage of product to the coast. There is the infrastructure on the west coast for handling containers. I have even been told by people in the container industry that there will not be bulk grain shipments in the future. Even grain will have to be put into a container so that the product is traceable. People who purchase and consume it will be able to ask where the product was grown, who grew it and what methods were used.
A lot of change is happening. As we know, the possibilities are endless in the west, in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia, for our natural resources and our energy sector. As for the ability to produce, we are becoming a bigger player in this country.
Although this initiative is a small step, it is something that our party will be supporting when it comes to a vote.