As always, it's a great pleasure to have you here, Commissioner, at the committee.
I would like to challenge you on a couple of areas around sustainability and the SDGs, and what our government is doing, including our focus on inequality and some of the challenges that we face as a society around that, and competitiveness, and demographic changes, climate change, including the environment and biodiversity in these areas.
How do we address some of these? I think it goes much broader than the focused lens you've put in here, especially when we talk about a whole-of-government approach around equality, the Canada child benefit, the guaranteed income supplement, the tax cut, the Canada workers benefit, the massive investments in affordable housing, and applying a gender-based lens to the budgets, investment in child care, the increases in parental leave.
On the competitiveness front, you have the massive investments in infrastructure and innovation, and the impact they have on helping our industry to become more competitive and productive, creating greater economic growth. On the indigenous front, you have the ending of drinking water advisories, massive investments in education, affordable housing, health care, and languages as well.
On the climate change front and the environment and biodiversity front, you have the $1.3 billion invested in the protected spaces, the $1.5 billion invested in the oceans protection plan, the price on carbon, the investments in public transit. Once again, you have the innovation in green technology, the investments in infrastructure on water and waste water. It goes on and on.
As you know, Rome wasn't built in a day. A lot of these investments and policy developments of ours are going to take time to bear fruit. You note that Statistics Canada has developed a data framework to measure results on the 232 global indicators, but hasn't compiled that data yet. You have also pointed out that in budget 2018 we have proposed providing $49.4 million over 13 years, starting in 2018-19, to establish a sustainable development goals unit.
Would you not agree that these investments and this whole-of-government approach, the massive consultations that have gone on with the provinces and indigenous communities, etc., in all of these different areas really do point to our moving in the direction of the sustainable development goals? The plan that will be developed by this new unit, I think, will point to these investments that we're making.