Mr. Chair, I'd like to thank the committee for inviting Sierra Club Canada Foundation to present today.
My name is David Snider. I sit on the board of directors of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation, and I have served as president and vice-president, in that order. With me today is Dr. Ole Hendrickson, who recently joined our board of directors.
Sierra Club Canada Foundation is a national environmental organization with a grassroots mandate: empowering people in their communities to tackle issues that affect the environment, with an aim of protecting, restoring and enjoying a safe and healthy planet.
We are members of the Green Budget Coalition and are proud to support their budget 2019 recommendations.
We have three recommendations that we wish to highlight for budget 2019 which we feel are important to achieving a sustainable economy, protecting wildlife and stabilizing our climate.
Recommendation one is to support a national wildlife collision reporting system and mitigation strategy. The consequences of wildlife-vehicle collisions include significant socio-economic, traffic safety, health and environment costs, including impacts on endangered species.
There is no doubt that collisions with wildlife across Canada are on the rise. Wildlife-vehicle collisions are a serious burden to our society, costing an estimated $200 million per year in Alberta alone in direct and indirect costs, according to an Alberta transportation study in 2015. A study commissioned in 2003 by Transport Canada recommended that a national collision data system was needed then, and that was 15 years ago.
The collision data is needed to plan mitigation measures and habitat connectivity. The federal government has shown some leadership on this issue with its work on wildlife crossings in Banff National Park. Provinces, including Alberta, B.C. and Quebec, are working on this issue. Alberta implemented a smart phone-based system for collecting wildlife collision data. The Sierra Club Canada Foundation has a program, Watch for Wildlife, in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
We're asking the federal government to work with the provinces and territories and environmental groups to develop and implement this strategy. We recommend that the government earmark a modest $1.5 million in budget 2019 to develop and implement a national wildlife collision reporting system and mitigation strategy with a national wildlife collision data collection system that will provide the data needed to plan collision mitigation infrastructure and create habitat connectivity plans.
Recommendation two is to continue and strengthen efforts to combat climate change by putting a price on pollution. Ottawa-Gatineau and the surrounding region was struck by six tornadoes last week. Western Canada was swathed in smoke from forest fires over the summer. Last spring, New Brunswickers endured record-breaking floods. The international scientific consensus is that these impacts are only going to worsen as global greenhouse gas emissions rise.
The carbon tax is a much-needed step, as it puts a price on pollution that is affecting all of us, and it will help steer our economy in the direction that it needs to go to shift away from fossil fuels. Economists agree that it's one of the most efficient ways of creating a shift away from fossil fuels.
Recommendation three is to identify and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, saving hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Subsidizing the fossil fuel industry makes it harder for us to make the much-needed switch to an economy based on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
In 2016 as part of the G20, Canada agreed to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The current government committed to phase them out as part of its election platform. Canada's Auditor General examined these subsidies in 2017 and recommended greater assessment to identify all the subsidies in place. He also found that there was no plan for phasing out subsidies.
A recent estimate put our subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Although clearly more work is needed to identify and quantify all subsidies, we commend the government for committing to conduct a peer review of these subsidies in 2017 following a voluntary G20 process. However, there are identified subsidies that could be phased out in budget 2019.
The purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline represents a giant step in the wrong direction with regard to our commitment to eliminate subsidies and tackle climate change. As you know, the cost of this decision could balloon from $4.5 billion to $11 billion. We are against this purchase, but if it proceeds, we call for complete transparency so that the government's investment does not become yet another subsidy by virtue of selling this infrastructure at a reduced cost in the future.
The expansion of the pipeline should not happen because that will make the emissions go beyond what Canada's climate commitments allow.
Thank you for having Sierra Club Canada Foundation here today to present its recommendations.