Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Minister, for appearing on vote 1.
I want us to talk about the Champlain Bridge today, since you're asking for money for the Jacques Cartier Bridge, the Champlain Bridge, and the Federal Bridge Corporation.
Yesterday, the Auditor General came out with a report that's quite critical of the project. I want to focus on one particular area that concerns decisions that your government has taken. Your government has said that it believes in sustainable development. In other words, things should be both economically sustainable and environmentally sustainable. It said that the environment and the economy go hand in hand, yet your government in November 2015 made a decision that actually does quite the opposite. The decision to eliminate the tolls on the Champlain Bridge was a purely political decision that is actually economically unsustainable and environmentally unsustainable.
The Auditor General has said that the decision to remove the toll on the Champlain Bridge had far-reaching implications and has said that the elimination of tolls is expected to result in revenue losses of at least $3 billion over the first 30 years of the bridge's use. That's a huge hole in the fiscal framework, particularly when your government is running significant deficits. Clearly, that is not economically sustainable, and the Auditor General, in his report, also said that the elimination of tolls is supposed to significantly increase vehicular traffic over the bridge by about 20%. The last time I checked, about 50 million trucks and cars cross that bridge each and every year, so that means an increase from 50 million cars and trucks to 60 million cars and trucks per year, an increase of 10 million vehicles per year with the attendant greenhouse gas emissions that entails. That is clearly not environmentally sustainable.
In fact, yesterday in the House we were debating amendments to the Federal Sustainable Development Act, and one of the principles that the government would like to incorporate in its lofty rhetoric around sustainable development is the principle of internalization, the idea that we take externalities to the economic system and internalize them by pricing them. In the decision to cancel the toll on this bridge, you have done quite the opposite. You've taken an internality and externalized it, which is precisely the opposite of what you said you wanted to do as a government.
In conclusion, Minister, the management of this bridge project, and particularly the decision to remove the toll on the bridge, is not only economically unsustainable, not only environmentally unsustainable, it is actually socially unfair. We have the Confederation Bridge that crosses from Prince Edward Island to the mainland to serve Prince Edward Islanders and people have to pay $47 in tolls to cross that bridge. We have a new federal bridge from Windsor to Detroit that's going to cross the Detroit River, on which the government has announced a toll will be placed, yet there will be no toll for the bridge in Montreal.
I don't know how in good faith we can give your portfolio more money when we see such mismanagement of this project and such inconsistency in the principles that the government says it upholds.