Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to address my colleague's questions but also to address some of the issues that she has brought up that are patently false. Our government has been working hard over the last several years of our tenure to ensure that the great plan we have in place, the contaminated sites action plan, has been well financed and implemented. We have been taking concrete action to address federal contaminated sites and the federal contaminated sites action plan is a 15-year program that is providing $3.5 billion in cost-shared funding to 16 federal departments and agencies for the assessment and remediation of high-priority federal contaminated sites.
To address her questions about the province of Quebec, over $93 million has been earmarked and spent to address contaminated sites in Quebec since 2005. Of the 22,300 sites listed in the federal inventory, about 2,200 or 10% of the inventory are in Quebec. Of those 2,200 sites, close to 900 are now closed. That is significant progress for the period that our government has been involved.
A closed site is one that requires no further action, either because an assessment of the site has found that there was no contamination present or because remediation has been completed. Therefore, 40% of all sites in Quebec are now in this closed category. This is great news for all Quebeckers and this represents good progress.
I want to point out that of the remaining 1,300 sites in Quebec that have not been closed, about 1,100 are currently either being assessed or, if action is needed, being remediated or risk managed. This represents 85% of the remaining sites in Quebec that are currently being worked on or have been worked on in the past. This leaves about 200 suspected sites that still require assessment.
Under the Treasury Board Secretariat policy on management of real property, deputy heads are responsible for ensuring that known and suspected contaminated sites are assessed and classified and risk management principles are applied for each site. Priority must be given to sites posing the highest human health and ecological risk.
Consistent with this policy direction, the evidence suggests that departments have been focusing on assessing and remediating the highest risk sites. In the early years of the federal contaminated sites action plan, about half of these assessments resulted in a site being found to be contaminated. More recently, only about one in five assessments actually found contamination. This shift indicates that departments have assessed and remediated the highest risk sites and are now finding fewer suspected sited to be contaminated. This is good news. It also means that of the remaining suspected sites in the inventory, including those in Quebec, many will be found to not be contaminated or require action. This is a track record that our government can be proud of.
The federal contaminated sites action plan program will continue through to 2020. We are halfway through the program now. We have made great progress and the Government of Canada will continue to address contaminated sites in the federal inventory. I am confident that we will continue to address the legacy of past practices to create a cleaner environment for future generations.
I hope my colleague can see that the inventory we have addressed in Quebec shows good progress not only for the country but for her constituents and her riding in the province of Quebec. I am certainly proud of this record and our government will continue to improve upon it.