Thank you, Chair.
To our witnesses, thanks so much for joining us tonight and for sharing your experiences and observations. It's very important that we hear from you.
I'm not quite sure where to start here. My colleagues on the committee know that I was a city planner for more than 20 years before coming to this job. I look at my work through that lens. You can't take the planner out of the kid, I guess. Because of my closeness to this file, I want to make sure we all understand that it was actually Paul Martin and the Liberal government that created the gas tax fund and made a requirement for integrated sustainable community funds and so forth that allowed access to that fund. Of course, that was in response to the starvation diet that cities had been on in a previous Conservative government. Then we saw that pattern repeat, leading up to the Liberal government in 2015.
We don't have to think back too far to remember the famous FCM report card on the state of municipal infrastructure in 2014-15. The phrase I remember is “a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability”. I certainly quoted that report card on just about every doorstep I stood on in the 2015 election.
What a distance we've come since then. We are now in a generational investment in community infrastructure. We are changing the appearance and the functionality of our country in our communities from coast to coast to coast. We have thousands of projects approved under the ICIP, with $180 billion at stake and with, of course, I should point out, no funding lapses. There's no such thing as funding lapses. It just gets carried over into the following year.
Right when we were hitting our stride with that, along came COVID. We answered the call again with the safe restart fund that we mentioned tonight; doubling the gas tax to puff up municipal coffers in their moments of need; and the rapid housing initiative. In fact, at two sites in Halifax, holes were dug in just the last week under the RHI.
There's a lot going on here. In fact, in the pandemic period just since March 2020, we approved over 3,100 projects worth over $4 billion. The vast majority are under way. They have actually commenced. I mean, these are the times when the planner in me can hardly believe it. I've been waiting for this my whole life, and I think maybe the witnesses have too. It's something that I could only dream about, back as an idealistic student, in terms of investing in communities in this way.
I know that I got a lot off my chest there, but I'm very excited, as you can tell. I want to land with the $1.5-billion green and inclusive community buildings fund. What we're trying to do is bring the economy back and create jobs, reduce GHGs, and create an inclusive economy and recovery in which everybody can participate. Community building is a beautiful way to do that.
Ms. Skivsky, I was particularly interested in your connection of that to building local capacity and local knowledge and training. I wonder if you or anyone else would like to jump in and talk about the impact of that program on communities and on our recovery.