Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for being here today and the Auditor General's office for its report on this. I do appreciate the work they've done on this.
I'm excited to have the Department of Transport here today so that I can ask them some questions. My questions around the report last time were more about policy, and the Auditor General assured me that they do not wade into areas of policy. However, I'm sure that the department does, so I'm happy to have them here.
The report talks about monitoring the fluidity of our transport trade corridors, and I thought it was very interesting, given the words “fluid” and “fluidity”, that pipelines don't really show up in the report at all. We have ports, airplanes and highways, but no pipelines. It seems to me that the government policy to oppose pipelines carte blanche across the country would have dramatic impacts on our ability to get Canadian products to market.
When I was elected in 2015, there were 14 major pipeline projects under review. One of those pipeline projects has actually been built—after the government bought the project from the company that was trying to build the project. We've seen the dramatic impacts of pipelines not being built affecting other areas of the transportation system. As oil didn't run through pipelines, it was then ending up on the railway. We heard about Lac-Mégantic as one of the results of that. However, we've also seen repeatedly where lumber or grain is unable to get out of northern Alberta because oil is consuming all of the rail traffic.
I guess we have Bill C-69, which has affected the ability to build pipelines, and we have Bill C-48, which, even if we could build the pipelines, we may not be able to ship the product out because of Bill C-48.
Have you noticed that some of the projects that have been approved to receive the funding haven't been able to go ahead because of Bill C-69 and Bill C-48?