Madam Speaker, my background is in municipal politics, relatively small community municipal politics so when the member opposite spoke about the problems with smaller municipalities and so on, it piqued my interested. However I suspect very strongly that his definition of a small municipality and my definition are somewhat different.
I come from a province that has a lot of very small communities where 8,000, 10,000 or 12,0000 people would be deemed to be a large community. I suspect the definitions are somewhat different.
Certainly I agree when the member opposite states that there is a fairly disproportionate amount of funding going to the larger communities. The problem I have as a member from a smaller rural area with small communities is that these funds, these gas taxes and certainly infrastructures funds as well, seem to be tailored around the demands and the requirements of the large municipalities with populations of 100,000 and up, of which there are not a lot in British Columbia. There is Kamloops, Prince George, Kelowna, a few on Vancouver Island, Victoria, and then of course Vancouver that probably fit the bill. However the smaller rural communities just do not fit.
In my estimation, most of these cost sharing programs fit the bill for the urban communities, not the rural communities. The little rural communities are left out. Yet the wealth of Canada comes from our small rural remote areas. Whether it is oil and gas, or minerals, gold, silver, lead, zinc and copper, most of it comes from more remote areas with small communities. Timber resources do not tend to be in downtown Vancouver. They logged that 120 years ago. The timber is in the north where the small communities are. Yet great amounts of money are generated, in terms of income tax, gas taxes and fuel taxes, that go to the federal government but very little of that comes back to these small communities.
That is a real travesty. It is something with which we need to deal. Small rural communities are definitely shortchanged. Quite often they cannot fit infrastructure programs, for instance, because they are cost sharing and they do not have the wherewithal to come up with their share. They have a very limited tax base and in some instances basically none because all the workers have moved out to bigger cities. It is just a huge problem for smaller communities.
Does the member have any suggestions as to how we could better assist, in a financial way, the small rural communities that are really truly the backbone of Canada.