Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to participate in this debate. It certainly impacts my area of the country, the province of British Columbia, which has a very significant port, one of the busiest ports in North America. Today we are debating amendments to the Canada Marine Act.
My comments will focus a little bit on the importance of supply chains and transportation and how those things are so critical to ensuring that Canada remains competitive and has a dynamic and vibrant economy.
I also want to talk a little about global trade in general and how important it is that we as Canadians start to identify the opportunities that we have to build trade with the emerging economies in the world, as well as expanding trade with the major trading partners that we already have.
Global trade and commerce are changing rapidly and transportation is one of the critical, if not the most critical, aspects of successful trading relationships. It may surprise many to know that the cost of transporting goods and commodities around the world has actually gone down, not up, despite the fact that we have much higher costs in terms of fuel. We have more modern technologies and higher commodity prices which translate into higher prices for equipment. In fact, the cost of transportation has gone down dramatically over many decades.
Today businesses around the world organize their production, not only at home but by outsourcing some activities to third parties. They will locate other activities outside of their home country. They will also form strategic alliances and joint ventures around the globe. We call these global supply chains.
Essentially, when a producer is producing a certain product, the research and development may be happening in one country, several components may be being made in one country and several others in another, and the actual assembly of those products may be done in a fourth country. All of those production units need to work together effectively and efficiently, and transportation is critical to ensuring that happens.
What else is critical in Canada is that our Asia-Pacific market is the new centre of gravity of world trade, in light of the fact that the trans-Pacific trade, especially the container market is growing so rapidly that the west coast of North America, particularly the port of Vancouver, is beginning to experience capacity problems.
In short, that means that our ability to handle the trade demands of the Asia-Pacific Rim countries is creating backlogs and deteriorating service levels. This holds true, not only for the west coast of Canada but across our great country. We have numerous significant ports in our nation.
There are a number of reasons for these capacity challenges and I will highlight three of them. First, the awful truth is that previous federal governments put little effort or funding into the expansion of our national transportation system. The result is an aging national infrastructure that is ill-suited to compete in the 21st century. That is why our Conservative government recently made the largest Canadian infrastructure investment in the last 50 years.
We have committed a total of $33 billion to our building Canada fund which will be spent on critical national infrastructure over the next seven years. For me this is exciting because it will improve infrastructure and especially transportation across our country. It will also benefit my province of British Columbia, the Asia-Pacific Gateway. I was so pleased to see that our government invested $1 billion to building infrastructure improvements in British Columbia, specifically to take advantage of gateway opportunities.
The second reason for capacity problems has been the steadily deteriorating level of service in the area of railway and freight transportation. For many years, virtually everyone who depends on shipping freight by our national railways has complained bitterly about the quality and level of service. To address this, we recently introduced Bill C-8 which would impose a new, more efficient way in which shippers could have their disputes about service and about ancillary charges resolved.
A third reason why Canada is beginning to have challenges in its gateways and trade corridors is that our major ports across the country do not have the legal flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing environments, specifically economic and trade environments. That is where Bill C-23 comes into play.
The bill would grant more powers to our gateway ports over the management of their own lands and more leasing powers. The ports would also be given greater authority to borrow money and to allow them to adapt more quickly to the changing needs of their customers. This is so key because we are in a global market and it is an incredibly competitive marketplace.
We do have some strategic advantages in British Columbia and in Canada to meeting those challenges, but we have to take advantage of them and the only way of doing that is to ensure our infrastructure is up to speed.