Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to the member for Niagara Centre for the question and for his leadership around Great Lakes issues. Most people around the table would probably recognize that he is one of our Great Lakes champions, and I want to thank him for his work.
As the member alluded to, the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative contributed to the development of the action plan 2020-30, along with the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Stratégies Saint-Laurent in Quebec, the Council of the Great Lakes Region, and Freshwater Future.
The action plan identified a series of recommendations around erosion, including the need to study this issue in a concerted and coordinated manner among the different levels of government, different stakeholders, indigenous communities and partners, as well as focusing on five shoreline priority zones: central west Lake Erie, central Lake Huron, central Lake Ontario, north central Lake Superior and southeastern Georgian Bay. It also identified priority zones in Quebec, including Montreal, Quebec City and the corridor that a lot of our interveners talked about today.
We continue to advocate around those recommendations in the action plan in order to hopefully see it funded, especially as a Canada water agency comes in line and as we hope to see the funding commitment of $1 billion in that freshwater action plan enacted, as well as further details around the national adaptation strategy.
I also just want to mention very quickly the recommendations of the mayors' commission on coastal resilience, which touched largely on the need for greater federal leadership and collaboration with the provinces around this issue to work in tandem with local communities that are impacted by this issue in order to identify the different impacts and causes of this, as well as identify different solutions that could be enacted.
We have a bias as an organization for nature-based and hybrid solutions, but we also recognize that, at the local level and with private landowners, we need to increase our knowledge and awareness around these solutions. We can't always have recourse to traditional hard and grey infrastructure solutions. What we need, again, is a centre of excellence or a series of technical guidance that municipalities can rely on in order to understand best solutions with respect to whether natural infrastructure, traditional infrastructure or a hybrid solution could be implemented in their given circumstances.
We also need to work together to identify and remedy local information and data gaps that exist. A lot of what we were hearing was the fact that there's a lot of information out there, but it's not being coordinated in a centralized manner, and that's something that we certainly see as a role for the Canada water agency, for example.
Finally, we need to work with municipalities to identify the knowledge gaps as we broaden this conversation around coastal resilience to include green infrastructure that takes socio-economic and equity considerations into mind.
I would also like to highlight the fact that we issued a survey last year where we identified, out of the 45 Ontario communities that responded to the survey, that they will be investing at least $275 million over the next five years to address coastal damage to the region. That's on top of the $82 million that has been spent by those 45 communities in the two previous years.
Even though we didn't get as much of a response on the Quebec side, unfortunately, we still identified $56 million that local communities in Quebec are planning to invest over the next five years.
I will stop there so I don't take up all of your time.