Okay.
I was just saying that trucks like SUVs—small trucks like SUVs—cost more and use more gasoline than mid-sized cars, for example. Canadians are buying increasing numbers of vehicles. Twenty years ago in 2000, there were fewer cars per 1,000 inhabitants in Canada compared to now. We're keeping the fleet growing faster than the population, which basically adds to congestion and to pollution. Basically, we are spending to create congestion and polluting more.
That's in personal transportation. In freight transportation, there are similar concerning trends.
In the last 20 years, freight truck transportation increased faster than trains, for example. All the statistics show that trains use less energy per tonne-kilometre and have less emissions per tonne-kilometre in moving one tonne over one kilometre, which is the standard unit in freight transportation—a tonne-kilometre. It basically costs more with trucks than with trains.
We've been developing the freight transportation modes with truck transportation, which is actually costing more for the Canadian economy and polluting more, in addition to creating more congestion on highways, instead of investing in railways that would actually free up space on the highways, cost less and pollute less. That's my second example.
My third example relates to housing.
In housing, building houses requires energy—resources—and once you have these buildings, you need to heat them and air-condition them. The trend all across Canada is that we have a bigger average square footage per house over time and fewer people in these houses.
The irony is that Canadians are spending more for more buildings at a time when there is a crisis in terms of housing, but there are fewer people in the average house. That's again an example of where we grow these houses, and we of course increase the energy consumption of these houses for fewer people. The average household size is actually decreasing over time. Again, that's an area where we spend a lot while polluting more.
The last example I'll share with you is that of food. With food, we tend to like animal-based protein food, when plant-based food is actually costing less and polluting less. If you have one kilogram of beef, for example, it will cost more and pollute more than one kilogram of plant-based protein. There are different habits that need to be changed, but the truth is that we are paying more for polluting more, just because we have the ability to do so because we're a rich country.
In conclusion, I would just say that I love wealth and I love being rich, but this level of wealth should not be an excuse for polluting more. We should be designing policies, such as more ecofiscality, to encourage Canadians to spend less on items that pollute and spend more on items that don't pollute. There are a lot of services that could actually raise our standard of living and could basically reduce the energy intensity of our economy while freeing up some resources to invest in more productivity and more wealth for Canadians.
I'll stop here. If you have questions, I'm able to answer them.