Thanks very much.
I'm sure that the voters of St. Catharines will have better days ahead instead of listening to that diatribe. On the motion, the substance of it seems to be that the Prime Minister's radical environment minister has announced an infrastructure plan of more soul-sucking traffic and more gridlock.
Anyone who has driven through the GTA has come to expect that highways are gridlocked. They'll sit in traffic missing productive time and missing time with their families. It's the Liberals' radical environment minister who only wants to see this get worse. Not only that, we have a Deputy Prime Minister who is just as out of touch. When she isn't being driven around by taxpayer-funded chauffeurs, she lives in a world that is separate from the reality of most Canadians, and frankly, from the reality of almost anybody in this meeting.
She brags that she doesn't own a car—that's a direct quote. I'm like, I don't know, 300 metres from the nearest walkway, I walk, and I take the subway. Here's the problem, though. Not all Canadians live on a subway line, and Canadians already send their tax dollars to Ottawa for road infrastructure.
When we have an environment minister who announces a new policy, it's incumbent on a committee to study that and at least call the environment minister. That's exactly why we're calling the environment minister and his colleagues to appear before this transportation committee and to hold them accountable for the extreme and reckless policy positions that he has put forward.
In case the committee doesn't recall, the member from St. Catharines, Mr. Bittle, was proud to run a victory lap.
We are talking about a history of activism that, in 2001, had the minister arrested and charged with mischief for scaling the CN Tower as part of Greenpeace stunt. I know that 2001 is long ago, but, even in 2019 in an interview, he said, “I'm still the guy who climbed the CN Tower”.
After two and a half years of his tenure as Liberal environment minister, there is no doubt that statement was true. He has proven himself to Canadians to be the radical, far left, Greenpeace activist that he has described himself to be. His actions as environment minister haven't made any constructive change or positive steps towards protecting the environment balanced with the reality that Canadians face to navigate the high interest rates driven by deficits and inflation, and, of course, the carbon tax that this government continues to impose on everyday Canadians. Rather, he has sought to divide, virtue-signal and implement an extremist agenda at each point of his tenure. He has doubled down on the punishing carbon tax that certainly doesn't work, and it floods the government coffers with hundreds of millions of dollars. It makes Canadians poorer, not richer.
He has an effective ban on fossil fuel development at a time when Canadians and, frankly, the world, need our natural resources more than ever. The latest announcement is that the Government of Canada will no longer build any roads. These roads connect our communities, drive economic prosperity for millions across the country, and, frankly, are the only way to get goods, people and everything else from one place to another when they are not 300 metres from a subway or have the transportation networks that are required.
We have broken ports in this country, ports that come up last on any list of the efficiency of getting goods into the country. We have a road system that, if you ask anybody who sits in traffic anywhere in the GTA, greater Vancouver, Montreal or Ottawa why they're sitting in their cars for hours at a time.... If you ask them if our road system is effective, they will surely tell you no.
When this active, radical environment minister tells Canadians from coast to coast, tell premiers and tell mayors that they are no longer funding roads, I think this committee ought to hear directly from him. He needs to answer to Canadians. That's exactly why we brought this motion here today, and that's exactly why we want to hear from him and his colleagues about the direction of this government rather than a laundry list of how government policy hasn't changed despite the fact that the government has announced a change in policy. You heard it directly from the environment minister.
Rather than playing defence for the radical environment minister, I think Canadians ought to hear him at this committee.
Bringing it back to the motion, rather than the diatribe we heard from the member for St. Catharines, Mr. Bittle, I think we should refocus this discussion on bringing the government's environment minister and his colleagues to committee to answer Canadians on why they want to stop construction of roads and why they want to continue with their radical agenda of environment policy that will quadruple the carbon tax and stop people from driving their cars, transferring their goods and seeing one another.
Thanks, Mr. Chair.