Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to my colleague, Mr. Barsalou-Duval, for the amendment.
I'm going to speak generally to the topic at hand, and I'll circle back to the amendment near the end.
Part of the issue here is that the minister did very clearly say that there's been a policy change. Mr. Bittle, on the other hand, has said at this meeting that there has been no policy change. The committee deserves to know which of those two things is true. Bringing the ministers to committee to elaborate on that apparent contradiction is a useful exercise and certainly in the public interest.
I know there were a lot of people across Canada, including the ministers who my colleagues have highlighted, who were surprised by the words of the environment minister. Here in northwestern B.C., there are a lot of remote communities that have challenges with road infrastructure. They want the federal and provincial governments to work together to ensure that they have safe and reliable road access to their communities, not just for the everyday needs of travel to larger centres but in cases of emergencies. We've seen wildfires and very serious weather events that have required communities to leave suddenly, and having good road infrastructure is vital in that regard. I'm thinking about Highway 51. This is the road to Telegraph Creek. It has suffered serious damage in the wake of the fires of 2018. The provincial government has put extensive money into that road, but it still requires additional work. I note that the provincial government has made commitments to continue that work. The question, of course, is what the role for the federal government may be in that partnership.
I'm here today in Fort St. James, and the road to the community of Takla Landing is an issue of urgent concern for that community. Folks in Takla rely on a forest service road, a resource road, that is mostly maintained by the forest companies that conduct activities in the area. When those activities turn downward, often the maintenance goes with them. There's really no consistent plan to upgrade the road to the standard that is required for the community as its primary access. They've highlighted their needs, and they would very much like for the provincial and federal governments to come up with a plan to upgrade that road so that they can more easily and more safely access nearby communities.
Of course, my colleague in northern Manitoba has highlighted the need for all-weather roads in that region. The Assembly of First Nations has estimated that the infrastructure gap when it comes to all-season roads is around $35 billion. Now, the loss of ice roads is a direct result of climate change. We need to invest in this all-weather infrastructure as part of our response to adapting to the extreme weather that we're experiencing more and more.
If anything, the minister's comments show a lack of due attention to the needs of rural and remote Canada. They show a sort of urban myopia that ignores many of the real needs of rural communities. When it comes to urban Canada—and, like it or not, Canada is an increasingly urbanized country—it's simply a reality that we need to do things differently from how we have in the past as a country. There are a number of questions that I think are very apt and that would be useful to ask as part of a study. I won't get into great depth, but financial resources are limited. We need to have solid plans for how to get people where they need to go and for how to efficiently use public resources to invest in infrastructure that does that while at the same time driving down greenhouse gas emissions and tackling climate change. I note that in my province of British Columbia, the provincial government has a target to reduce light-vehicle kilometres-travelled by 25% by 2030. A big part of that is the investment in transit, which is something that the environment minister mentioned. However, this government's permanent public transit fund isn't going to start until 2026.
We've heard very clearly from municipalities that not only is the gap between 2024 and 2026 unacceptable, but the size of the permanent public transit fund is insufficient given the massive need for infrastructure investment and the escalation in construction costs that communities are facing.
There are pretty important questions that we need to ask, such as, if indeed the government's policy is to invest less in highways and freeways and more in public transit in order to get people where they need to go, whether the magnitude of the investments they are willing to commit to are adequate to achieve that. The reality is that people who live in the suburbs that Mr. Strahl identified do need to get to work, and they can't afford to live in the centres of our big cities where housing is simply unaffordable. These are questions that I think the committee could grapple with as part of a study, as part of a meeting with the ministers, and I think it's in the public interest for us to get to the bottom of this.
Along with that, I mentioned the all-weather roads, but we have a larger question about our highway infrastructure and its resilience in the face of climate change. Just last year, I believe, we saw the atmospheric rivers in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia tear out a huge amount of transportation infrastructure. Understanding whether we're investing enough as a country in the resilience of the existing infrastructure is an issue of urgent concern.
I think the proposal that Mr. Barsalou-Duval has brought forward—that the committee have a meeting with the appearance of several ministers in order for us to scope out what a more comprehensive study might look like—is a worthwhile endeavour.
I have heard at previous meetings my Conservative colleagues insist that this committee's practice in the past has been that we have a fairly orderly approach to how we approach studies, and that each party has the ability to bring forward studies in due course and have those completed. I would note that the committee is currently studying both the issue of high frequency rail and the issue of the accessibility of air travel in Canada. My hope would be that before we embark on a more in-depth study on highway and road infrastructure in Canada we would complete those studies, as has been this committee's practice, but I am willing to support the amendment, which would see a more timely meeting on this particular topic, with the three ministers appearing as Mr. Barsalou-Duval has outlined.
With that, Mr. Chair, I'll turn the floor back to you.
Thank you.