We are located in the heart of Vancouver Island, at the end of the long inlet—or deep, natural fjord—open to the Pacific Ocean. We do have a lot of answers to the concerns and problems that we are facing today, especially with the project that we are proposing to develop, a large container terminal in the Port Alberni Inlet to be used as a transshipment hub to help alleviate congestion in the Lower Mainland.
To elaborate more, each cargo ship passes in front of the Alberni Inlet when it's on its way out of the Salish Sea area. Then each cargo ship goes to Seattle to offload and load cargo and then goes to Vancouver to do the same thing, and a week or so later passes by on its way back to Asia. Once the cargo is offloaded on the Lower Mainland, it gets put on a truck that goes up and down the city streets and creates congestion and problems with traffic and commuters.
Furthermore, we are moving a lot of cargo by rail as well. Alberta is a bit of a culprit in that too. It moves a lot of cargo to distribution centres in Calgary and Edmonton to be offloaded, and then the empty containers are brought back, congesting our railway to a degree. Those distribution centres have been moved to Calgary and Edmonton because of the lack of space and the cost of a warehouse, which is quite high in the Lower Mainland.
Essentially, we are proposing to create a large hub and then sort out the cargo and deliver that cargo by barge to the closest point to the end-user, at the same time alleviating congestion on the road and bringing that cargo up the Fraser River to Port Kells, to Annacis Island, right next to the warehouse. This would minimize the truck traffic and impact on the community. It would also deliver a full trainload to Deltaport and Vanterm terminals that was destined for eastern Canada, and essentially unload the full train directly from the barge, increasing optimization and efficiency.
At the same time, we will be able to open up Vancouver Island, which my colleague this morning mentioned, is growing in population. Right now, the population of Vancouver Island is about 800,000 people. We are expecting to grow, as the CEO of the Port of Nanaimo mentioned, to 1.5 million. It's a large population base on its own. Just to compare, that is one-third of the Lower Mainland. It's larger than three eastern Canadian provinces. If we grow to 1.5 million, we'll probably surpass Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia in population. All our goods and everything we produce or consume has to go via the Lower Mainland, which creates congestion in the Lower Mainland on road and rail, and doesn't allow direct access to the international market for the businesses and companies we have on Vancouver Island.
The PATH project, or the Port Alberni trans-shipment hub will essentially help alleviate a lot of those problems both environmentally and economically. It will help alleviate road and rail congestion as well.
Thank you.