Good morning, colleagues, and thank you to our witnesses.
My name is Wayne Long. I have been a member of Parliament since 2015 for the beautiful riding of Saint John—Rothesay. That's in southern New Brunswick. I'm wearing a blue blazer, blue shirt with white polka dots, and I have brownish-grey messy hair again this morning, unfortunately.
Before I start, I do want to apologize on behalf of the committee to Mr. Sutton for the problem that happened last week. That was unacceptable. We all know that, and we need to do better, so I apologize.
I just have a few comments. My riding of Saint John—Rothesay, obviously, is in an old city. It's an old historic city with many old beautiful buildings. Many of the businesses are in those buildings. I've become keenly aware that a large percentage of those buildings are just not accessible. I mentioned last meeting that we have a friend who's in a wheelchair. Everybody means well, but you just don't give it the thought. We were going to go to a restaurant with him, but we really struggled to find one in uptown Saint John that he could go to with us, because the restaurants simply weren't accessible.
I'm a proud member of HUMA. I've been with HUMA since 2015. In 2019, MP Falk, MP Chabot and I were part of that group that brought in Bill C-81 with Minister Qualtrough at the time. We're very proud of that legislation, the Accessible Canada Act. To all of your points on being barrier free by 2040, we're almost in 2025. We've got a better part of 15 years to get this right, and you've all touched on it, but I want to start with you, Mrs. Kurdi.
Everybody on this committee wants to get there. We know we need to get there. Mr. Lepofsky said at the last meeting that we've got a lot of groundwork to cover to get there.
Mrs. Kurdi, I wouldn't say we need to correct our course, but what can we do immediately to make sure that we hit our goal of 2040? Give me three things that you think we need to do right away.