We don't have a good picture of the cost of our energy transportation system, the transportation system, or mobility across Canada. We don't have a good grasp on how much it costs us as a country to build the roads, to maintain the roads, to buy the cars, and to maintain cars and SUVs on the roads.
With regard to our heavy trucks compared with rail, rail uses one-tenth the energy of heavy trucks. Canada has not invested in new railroads for the last 50 years. CN and CP are just maintaining their railroads. We don't invest in new railroads. Our priority infrastructure project should be to connect Canada for freight because heavy truck transportation is expensive. It's destroying roads because heavy trucks are heavy. This is what costs us a lot in terms of roads. They take space, and many of these heavy trucks go across Canada.
We don't have a good picture of how heavy trucks could be substituted by rail and what the overall cost to society would be. So far, CN and CP are not interested in building new railroads because they see their businesses as extremely operational. They operate their railways extremely well, but they don't think in terms of investment. If we want to reduce greenhouse gases by 30% in 2030, now is the time to ask how we will transport freight in 12 years. We will need to have fewer trucks.
We talk about electric trucks and hydrogen trucks. These are fine and we'll need them, but you cannot electrify all these heavy trucks easily. It will cost a lot, so you will need more railways. We've built Canada on railways. We should build a 21st-century Canada on railways. That will not exclude the individual vehicles or trucks; it will be a complement. If we look at the growth of freight traffic in Canada, it's heavy trucks that have taken the majority of the growth, at the cost of more congestion and more road damage. These heavy trucks are the vehicles that are destroying roads and creating the issues. More data on freight transportation and on cost would help us a lot.
Building efficiency is a key area. There should be more information on how we're using energy in buildings and on what is the energy saving potential we could achieve.