Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House once again to speak to the Bloc Québécois motion on shoreline erosion. I will be splitting my time with the member for Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry.
I would like to speak to the transportation committee study for a bit and talk about the government's response to it. Then I will share some of the factors that are affecting shoreline erosion and the urgency of the situation in my own riding. As always, I will come with helpful solutions that might be a good path forward.
First, the study identifies that the speed of vehicles is a factor, which is true. My riding of Sarnia—Lambton certainly experienced that, when the Coast Guard sped through the channel, broke the ice and broke the whole Sombra ferry. Instead of fixing it for $2 million, the government, the member at the time, who is now in charge of public safety but was in charge of DFO, decided not to fix it. Instead it was decided to lose $4 million a year of CBSA revenue, lose a border crossing and eventually lose $6 million in a lawsuit over the whole thing. Speed is an issue and it needs to be brought down. Not everyone complies with the speed.
With the other factors, the government's response was delayed by 18 months. This is typical of the government. It does not really know how to do the business of government well. In the response, it is talking a lot about research and studies that need to be done. However, when the House is on fire, that is not the time to begin research on the accelerating factors in burning of different materials. That would be the time to take urgent action to put the fire out. That is where we are.
All day long we have heard members from different ridings talk about the urgency of shoreline erosion in their areas, and the government has been very deaf on this point. I hear all the time that it is climate change. When we talk about climate change, we need to understand what part of that is playing into shoreline erosion. From my engineering background, water levels increasing and decreasing makes a big difference in shoreline erosion.
In design engineering principles, we look at the 100-year cycle of water levels in places like the St. Clair River and the St. Lawrence Seaway. We look at 100-year storms. The problem is now we are seeing 100-year storms every couple of weeks, so that has greatly exacerbated the problem. In addition to that, we are not able to deal with it.
In the Great Lakes area, we have the infrastructure in place in Niagara that is supposed to maintain the water levels in the Great Lakes. However, that infrastructure only has the capacity of changing the level by one inch per month. With the inches and inches of rainwater that we are seeing and the fluctuations there, we just do not simply have the infrastructure to address water levels, and that is making the situation worse.
In addition to that, there is not always good engineering design put in place. In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, there is a stretch of beach between Canatara Park and Brights Grove. It is all very homogeneous. In the stretch from Canatara Park to the midpoint at Murphy, the shoreline protection has been properly engineered. The groins are 100 feet apart. They are long enough, tall enough and made of adequate materials, so there is no shoreline erosion in evidence there. However, what has happened on the next stretch of beach is that people, as they built their property, decided to put something in place that was not properly engineered. They have huge issues to the point that in Brights Grove the road was falling down right next to Lake Huron. They had to close it and do an emergency repair.
Since 2015, when I was elected, I have been trying to negotiate to get the $150 million that is needed in Sarnia—Lambton to address its issues. With three levels of government, the revolving door of ministers who have handled infrastructure and the lack of funding that somebody could actually apply for and get funding for shoreline erosion, the government has been all talk and no action on this file.
There are issues downriver in my riding, in St. Clair township, with a lot of low-level housing getting flooded. It is not just a St. Clair township thing. We see it in Gatineau every year with the Gatineau floods. There is a huge issue there.
It is not that the solutions are unknown. We know how to put in aggregate rock. We know what the better things are to put in some areas versus others and what to do for people, but we need to have a holistic solution. In one area in my riding, which is a rather wealthy area, landowners are losing 30 feet to 50 feet of their land every year from shoreline erosion. Owners are spending $50,000 and $100,000 apiece to put in their own seawall, but then that passes the problem down to the next neighbour. What is needed is a holistic solution, which could be funded jointly with municipalities, individuals and the federal government. The province has a role to play, but doing nothing and letting this piecemeal thing continue to happen is certainly not a solution.
When it comes to what we ought to do, we oftentimes hear the Liberal government say that it is “seized” with this solution. Again from an engineering perspective, a motor that is seized means it is not moving. That is exactly what we are seeing from the Liberal government, which is that it is not moving and not taking any action. It is not acceptable.
If we look to the solutions that the Liberals want to put in place, they have decided, again, that we need another committee to distribute another fund. I do not know how many times they have to repeat the same behaviour before they recognize that putting a whole bunch of Liberal appointees onto a committee to administer a fund is a disaster.
Let us start with the Infrastructure Bank: $35 billion of infrastructure money was taken from municipalities and put into a committee to administer it. No projects came out the other end, but everybody was getting a great salary. It was a terrible idea.
On the sustainable green fund, the Liberals wanted another committee to distribute the billion dollars in funds. Here we are today not able to do any government business because of the scandalous 186 conflicts of interest, people giving money from the committee to their own companies, as well potentially to the companies of cabinet ministers. It is a disaster.
The suggestion that we should do this is a bad idea. The Liberals are suggesting the same thing for Bill C-63. Instead of addressing the exploitation of children online, which is a serious offence, they want to create a parallel Liberal-appointed committee that would look at these issues. The committee would not have the ability to do anything in terms of criminal consequence, but it would make everybody feel better, and everybody would get better paid. That is not a solution, and I do not recommend it here at all.
This increase in people does not necessarily give us a better result. We have seen a 40% increase in public sector employees, but we do not see a corresponding improvement in response times from CRA or from immigration, from any of these things. In fact, we actually see worse results.
None of the solutions that have been put forward are the right ones. There is urgency, not just in my riding. We heard of other ridings for which this is urgent. I would be remiss if I did not speak up for former MP Bill Casey, who, when he was here, always talked about the linkage between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. This is critical infrastructure, and it is going to be washed away. This will be a huge issue for all the people living in those regions, and it is not being tackled with the urgency needed.
We need to use the funds we have. We have an infrastructure fund. Could we use it to build things? Could we use it for shoreline erosion? Every time someone applies for one of these funds, it is like the fund is a little boutique, where people need to have this, that or something else. Each riding has its own needs and each riding knows what to do about it. Why do we not take the existing infrastructure money we have and work with the municipalities to address shoreline erosion?
