Thank you, Brock.
In the 2009 budget, Parliament set aside $5 billion in new federal stimulus funding for provincial, territorial, and municipal infrastructure projects. Today municipalities are matching federal investments in their communities. We manage stimulus projects from design right through to construction and completion. We're working flat out to put stimulus dollars to work, creating jobs and meeting local needs. Working together we have made progress, but the job is not done and there are lessons to learn from the work done in the past year. If we make the right decisions now, we can continue to strengthen our economy, deliver greater value to taxpayers, improve infrastructure programs, and respond more effectively to future economic crises.
To that end, on behalf of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, I would like to underscore a few key points.
First, while governments implement the stimulus plan they must also begin to look beyond the immediate economic crisis. We must position Canada to succeed in a tough, competitive post-recession world. As we come out of the recession and budget deficits reappear, we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s. That was when the federal, provincial, and territorial governments pushed deficits off their balance sheets and into local streets. They cut programs and offloaded responsibilities, leaving the municipalities to pick up the pieces. Those decisions added to the burden on property taxpayers and fuelled growth in what is today's $123 billion municipal infrastructure deficit.
The federal stimulus plan, along with the 100% GST rebate, the federal gas tax fund, the Building Canada fund, and the public transit capital trust are helping municipalities repair their aging foundations. They are also helping to provide the modern infrastructure and transportation networks that Canada needs to compete in the post-recession world. While stimulus spending is inherently short term, if Canada is going to thrive in the post-recession world, the federal government must protect and build on these other investment programs. Therefore, secondly, all governments must commit to keeping the stimulus plan on track and to make sure to put every single dollar to work in communities across the country.
Canada's economic recovery is fragile and new jobs will be scarce for years to come. As many Canadians struggle to find work and make ends meet, they need to know their governments won't be letting stimulus dollars collect dust in Ottawa or in their provincial capitals. Therefore, thirdly, as municipalities co-fund and manage thousands of stimulus projects across the country, federal and provincial governments must be supportive and flexible to ensure cities and communities have the time and resources to put stimulus dollars to work.
As you know, the infrastructure stimulus plan was rolled out faster than any previous cost-shared infrastructure program, but the time required to get it up and running still meant that many municipalities lost much of the 2009 construction season. Cities and communities waited, although not always patiently, for federal, provincial, and territorial governments to negotiate funding agreements, to design programs, and to approve individual projects. Today, no order of government has more at stake in the stimulus plan than municipalities. Communities have been hard hit by the recession and are looking to their mayors and their councillors for answers. Municipalities across the country have re-opened their capital budgets to find the money to match federal stimulus dollars, often taking on additional debt or shifting dollars from other priorities.
In addition to matching federal investments in their communities dollar for dollar, municipalities are the front-line project managers for most of Canada's stimulus projects. To successfully finish these projects and to turn every stimulus dollar into a new job, municipalities will need the same support and flexibility, the same patience they showed the federal, provincial, and territorial counterparts during the start-up of the stimulus plan.
Municipalities must not be held responsible for project delays beyond their control. Where federal, provincial, and territorial governments are responsible for delays--and this is key--they must also be prepared to extend the March 2011 construction deadline for municipal projects, where necessary.
Another key point, and one of particular note, is that we should not wait for a crisis to hit before building better infrastructure programs. When the economic crisis hit, the federal government not only faced the challenge of getting new programs up and running across the country, but it also had to fix programs that had been a drag on cost-shared, application-based programs for more than 15 years.
Minister Baird and his officials worked hard to clear the funding backlog in the Building Canada fund, to deal with excessive red tape, cumbersome application forms, and drawn-out approval processes. But none of these problems were new, and they've been an ongoing source of delay, inefficiency, and cost overruns for almost a generation. A serious effort to fix these problems before the economic crisis would have saved time and resources when the crisis hit.
Finally, all orders of government need to work together to build better infrastructure programs. A lot has been said recently about how stimulus projects are being selected, how spending announcements are being made, and how the government is tracking the number of jobs that its plan is creating. These are fair questions that deserve good answers. But they are questions about the way government works, not the value of infrastructure spending.
Governments must always decide on how to set policy objectives, allocate resources, communicate decisions, and evaluate results. How they do it will go a long way in determining the success of a program, whether we're talking about infrastructure spending, health care, tax policy, or unemployment insurance. The case for investing in infrastructure is strong. The question is how the federal government should design its spending programs. As a first step, it should sit down with provinces, territories, and municipalities to establish national objectives for federal infrastructure spending and work with them to design programs that achieve those objectives.
During the past year, Canada was tested by a severe global economic crisis. Federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal orders of government responded to that crisis by working together. There is still a great deal of work to get the country back on to solid ground, but we have made a good start. Crisis management is never perfect.