Thank you.
Madam Chair, members of the standing committee, I'm Roy Timms, a past chairman of the Niagara Industrial Association, and I'm here today representing our 220 members, who manufacture about a billion dollars' worth of goods per year. Together the association has prepared this submission for your consideration, and we thank you for the opportunity.
We believe in Niagara's future as a critical Canadian trade hub and a vital contributor to our country's economic well-being. Niagara has significant untapped potential and far too much idle opportunity. Niagara is well positioned as a next-generation strategic transportation corridor. We are located between Canada and the United States and boasted $105 billion in trade value crossing our borders in 2015. Three-quarters of the St. Lawrence Seaway's $34.6 billion in economic activity passes through the Welland Canal, which runs through the centre of the peninsula.
Niagara is a day's truck drive in any direction to a growing 140-million-person marketplace in Canada and the United States. We've also been designated as Ontario's first foreign trade zone point. Niagara is a major hub and intermodal freight transport point. We have significant potential for growth. Our proximity to the U.S.-Canadian border is unique. We have inexpensive available land, tidewater shipping access, and a class A rail access connecting to American rail carriers. We also have a short rail line running the width of the peninsula. We have a well-maintained highway network plus a world-class affordable standard of living for new residents.
All told, this gives us a unique situational advantage with tremendous potential to become a hub that complements and reduces overburdened corridors such as the GTA. Ontario and the northeastern United States are forecast for continued growth. Niagara has the potential to accommodate significant increased transportation of Canadian raw materials and finished goods for decades to come. We are certain that creating this trade infrastructure in Niagara is an important piece for ensuring the development and sustainability of Canadian export trade.
We believe the Canadian trade corridor strategy should leverage all this opportunity and natural advantage by implementing enhancements to the road, rail, bridge, and waterway networks creating corridors more accessible to Niagara's industrial sector and employment lands.
Of primary importance, we have a pressing need for faster, more reliable U.S. border access across congested Niagara international bridges. We envision a connection from Buffalo to the Hamilton airport to the Brantford—Kitchener-Waterloo—London corridor utilizing a mid-peninsula highway. This would be a new highway that has been under consideration for quite a while.
Stakeholders agree this powerful link will unleash a strategic bottleneck that is vital to the future economic development of southwestern Ontario. The proposed mid-peninsula highway is undergoing environmental assessment. We urge the federal government to add its support and financial underpinning for the project.
In addition, the strategy would be connected to the development of industrial commercial parcels that have been vacant for far too long along the Welland Canal. As you know, a major transition is taking place with the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation. It's now involved in a federal review, studying possible opportunities for development.
Niagara is a clear candidate for that kind of change. Other ports along the seaway have grown and prospered, but the lands along the Welland Canal have remained stagnant for the life of the agreement.
This is not to cast blame on the seaway for the stagnation, because land development is not their core business, but it is time for a new focus, with energized lead players focusing on the underutilized federal asset, the employment lands along the Welland Canal.
A Niagara trade corridor strategy should also include a corresponding industrial investment strategy that creates jobs to rezone new lands—