Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing, in particular a former colleague, Mayor Savage. It's great to see you again.
We're here because the Parliamentary Budget Officer has issued several reports that are quite critical of the government's infrastructure spending. In particular, the government is not meeting the growth or job creation targets that it set out in budget 2016. It said it would create some $46 billion in new economic growth as a result of infrastructure spending. It also said it would create tens of thousands of new jobs. The PBO has indicated that, based on its assessment, only 11,000 jobs have been created in the last year, and instead of some $46 billion in economic growth, only $4 billion, less than a tenth of what was originally projected, has been created.
One of the reasons the PBO has given for this lacklustre growth and lacklustre job creation is the fact that the government is not getting the money out the door enough.
Some witnesses have indicated they're not overly concerned about the cash-flow issues and the fact that the government is not meeting its own spending commitments. In fact, we had one witness here, a professor, who referenced a McKinsey Global Institute report that said Canada is spending too much money on infrastructure, and that report suggested we should reduce spending on infrastructure.
On the other hand, we have hard data from Statistics Canada that demonstrates things are getting worse. Last November, StatsCan issued a report indicating commuting times are getting worse. The average daily commute for Canadians is up 4% despite the fact that commuting distances are down in the census metropolitan area of greater Toronto. For the five-year period they were analyzing, StatsCan said people are driving shorter distances but the amount of time they are spending in their cars is actually up, so the average commuting time now in the GTA, the country's largest metropolitan region, is now over one hour a day.
I guess I'm looking for comments—critical in a constructive sense—about the government's infrastructure plans and what we can do to arrest this disturbing trend whereby Canadians are commuting shorter distances but spending much more time doing it. We want to come out of this with a report, with some constructive recommendations for the government on how it can improve its infrastructure spending.