Comments from Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault to stop funding road construction in Canada continue demonstrate — yet again — “how tone deaf he is on environmental issues,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said Wednesday.Speaking from Jasper National Park to unveil a new tourism strategy — which represents one of the largest federal outlays of road construction dollars in Alberta — Smith said Guilbeault’s comments show that he has no understanding of how big Canada is geographically or the role places such as Jasper and Banff play in Alberta’s tourism economy.“Anyone who thinks that you can stop building roads has obviously not travelled outside of Montreal very much. It doesn't understand how big this country is. It doesn't understand what it takes to get to some of our resort communities,” she said.“I think that if we can find more ways for people to conveniently get to our mountain park areas we should be looking at that, vehicles will be one aspect of that.”.In a demonstration of some ‘active transportation’ of his own, Guilbeault seemingly walked back some of the comments he made to a transit conference in Montreal on Monday, saying they applied to “large” road projects such as the $6.5 billion ‘3eme lien’ commuter tunnel in Quebec City and Ontario’s proposed Highway 413.“Of course we're funding roads. We have programs to fund roads," he told reporters in Ottawa after the remarks caused an uproar on social media, with Smith, Ontario’s Doug Ford and even Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe weighing in.Ford said he was “gobsmacked” that a federal cabinet minister would say something so banal. Anonymous government officials stressed there had been no change in government policy.Conservative MP and transportation critic Mark Strahl called it “radical and extreme.”Under the Liberal’s Canada Community Building Fund (CCBF), previously known as the Gas Tax Fund, the government spends more than $2 billion per year to fund a variety of projects including public transit, local roads and bridges, tourism — and yes — highways..But there was no mistaking Guilbeault’s ideological bent, which was on clear display. There was very little ambiguity in his remarks."There will be no more envelopes from the federal government to enlarge the road network," Guilbeault said, according remarks published in the Montreal Gazette. "We can very well achieve our goals of economic, social and human development without more enlargement of the road network."Smith was quick to concur and wondered aloud how he still had a job.“I think that it's just another demonstration of his ideology. I mean, two weeks ago, he was telling us all that we had to drive electric vehicles, and now that it's demonstrating that people don't want to buy electric vehicles and the speed and rates that he's proposing, we see he's shifting gears saying, ‘Well, you shouldn’t drive at all. You should take the bus’. Well, that’s not a reasonable option in most places in the country,” she said.“I don't know why his caucus and cabinet are continuing to put up with it, but that's something that they're going to have to deal with internally. But I think increasingly, he's demonstrating how out of touch he really is.”
