Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for inviting the foundation here today.
For Canadians to maintain a high quality of life with continued economic opportunity, we must increase Canada's long-term competitiveness through responsible environmental policies. We've got to stop equating environmental protection with poor economic performance in this country. As many of you may know, last month the World Economic Forum released its global competitiveness index. Canada finished 16th, a drop of three places from last year.
Recently, the David Suzuki Foundation released a report that ranks the environmental performance of the thirty member states of the OECD. Eight of the global competitiveness index's top ten finishers also finished well ahead of Canada in the OECD environmental ranking. In fact, the poorest performer of the top economic group, the U.K., still managed to finish ten spots ahead of Canada on the OECD environmental ranking.
One of the policies that these top economic performers is employing, and that Canada has not yet begun to employ, is something called ecological fiscal reform, or EFR. EFR brings environmental factors into economic policy making by introducing the true social cost of pollution and waste into the marketplace. For example, water is substantially undervalued in this country. Some municipalities don't even meter or charge for the water their constituents use. In essence, it is treated as though it is limitless. This can, as we know, lead to cyclical water shortages, and in worst-case scenarios it can lead to contaminated water, which causes serious health problems, if not worse. Pricing water as though it were worthless is an obvious example of how the market needs correcting.
Another example is our air. In Canada, it costs absolutely nothing to dump industrial waste and pollutants into the atmosphere. The few emission caps that exist are weak, and for some pollutants, such as CO2, there is no cap whatsoever. Our air is taken for granted as a no-charge, no-fee dumping zone in a way that other waste repositories such as landfills, for example, are not. Why is that? And what are the consequences for Canada?
Atmosphere dumping negatively affects Canadians in several ways, including our competitiveness. Air pollution leaves many workers, as well as their children, sick, which reduces Canada's labour competitiveness and places a burden on our strained health care system. A smog-ridden downtown also encourages companies and citizens to relocate to the suburbs, which in turn increases transportation costs and travel times. This increases transportation distances and, in a negative feedback cycle, further diminishes the quality of our air. The solution lies in taking steps to ensure that market prices reflect the true cost of pollution and waste.
Thank you.