Sadly, I think we're doing very badly.
As I explained, we are spending a lot of money on continuing the same system that pollutes and impoverishes us. There was $81 billion spent last year on individual cars to basically increase the fleet of cars, increasing congestion in our streets and increasing the amount of gasoline consumption, because people are buying trucks instead of cars, just because they like them.
I understand why they like them, but the problem is that our future is under threat because of climate change. We are in a deficit. Some people have a hard time buying food, but some people like having a bigger car. Then they spend $10,000 more on a truck compared to a car, and that's for 1.5 million new vehicles.
We are doing very badly because the investments we're making in pollution aren't being made to get us on a path where we will be more resilient in a changing climate and less dependent on oil. We're not spending the money where we should spend the money. We continue spending money on urban sprawl in wetland areas. We're destroying ecosystems to build new homes when, as I said, the average size of homes continues to increase. We have a crisis of empty spaces in Canada because we have empty rooms because people like to have big rooms.
At the same time, there's an irony and a big paradox because, while some people have a hard time affording a house, we have a lot of empty rooms in our buildings. There should be some kind of ecofiscal policies to make people either rent some rooms in their big homes so that they can make use of the space they aren't using now, or, if they don't want to rent or share, basically they would have to pay higher taxes to help build sustainable houses.