Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe.
This is a fairly simple motion. It makes common sense. It talks about making permanent a fund that will go toward cities so that they can do all of the things that they need to do.
In the old days, cities fixed the roads, looked after the lights and those kinds of things. In the 21st century, they are responsible for so many things. Cities are now the places where immigrants come to live. Cities are responsible for physical infrastructure. They are responsible for social infrastructure. They are responsible for public health issues. They are responsible for arts and culture. They are responsible for tourism. They are responsible for sport. They are responsible for crime prevention and enforcement.
Today, municipalities and cities carry the burden which, in the old days, provincial governments and federal governments carried. That is a good thing for cities to be able to do, not to carry the burden but to do those things, mainly because they are the level of government that is closest to the people. It is the level of government that understands the local ways of delivering things that will actually be effective and efficient.
It is one thing for Ottawa to say, “We think you should do things this way”, when locally in a particular rural municipality or in a particular urban municipality, they know it will not work that way. What works in Toronto I know never works in Vancouver, and what works in Vancouver does not work in Winnipeg.
It is common sense for cities to have to do this. However, because cities have taken on this major burden, we as a federal government need to play a role in helping them to shoulder that burden.
Some people have said that cities have a deficit of $60 billion. I think the recent studies by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities said it is $100 billion. This is increasing at the rate of $2 billion a year. We can do the math. In the past, federal governments had programs, a little program for this and a little program for that, and we put a few million dollars into this and a few million dollars into that. Each year cities did not know whether those programs were going to be continued, whether they were going to be there for three years, five years or whatever.
It is time to treat cities and municipalities with respect, to treat them as an equal level of government. This is what the Liberals began to do in 2005 when we started to talk about a new deal for cities. We started to talk about communities. A sign of that respect was the creation of a minister responsible at the cabinet table for dealing with municipalities. We realized that we should not be handing down charitable things to the municipalities. We need to work with them.
Partnership is important. The word “partnership” actually indicates respect. It indicates equality. It indicates sitting at a table and asking what we need to do to make a difference, not merely giving a handout and attaching 2,000 strings to it, saying cities can only use it for this or that. We began this move forward in 2005.
I heard many speakers on the government side say that they have given the gas tax to cities. Actually, that is not quite true. This is something a Liberal government did. We transferred the gas tax. They also talked about how they gave a GST rebate. Actually, the Liberal government did that. If we look at it, we are talking about $11.8 billion in gas tax and we are talking about $5.8 billion in the GST rebate.
What we are saying is it is not good enough for that to be a one-shot deal, to give it this year but maybe not next year. We are talking about sustainability and permanence, the ability for cities to plan.
As members well know, cities do not have a lot of ways to get money. They do not have huge tax bases. They tax housing and property and that is about it, yet they have all of this need for money to spend. They are not allowed to go into a deficit, so they borrow. Cities every year put these balanced budgets forward and in the meantime they are racking up their debts. Cities are deep in debt as well. Therefore, we need to think about this because for every dollar taxpayers pay, it is the same taxpayer paying the dollars to three levels of government.
It is time we did things differently. It is time we sat down and respected each other and came up with integrated, comprehensive ways of doing things. It does not mean we say to cities or communities that this is what has to be done and then hand them money and let them wait year after year. It is time to set permanent structures to do this.
There has been a lot of talk across the way by the government members that they did this and they did that. I have given a nice compliment that the government accepted the Liberal gas tax and the Liberal GST rebate. The government has said it will make that permanent. At the same time, the government has put new money in. I heard an hon. member say that this new money is money the federal government should have been spending anyway. When it talks about national highways, that is not a municipal agenda, that is a national agenda. The federal government should not be counting that as something it handed over to the cities. We are talking about gateways. Again, these are national programs. Those should not be included in the money the government gives to cities to pay for the things that cities need to build.
Cities are now responsible for housing. We can go into the big cities of this country and the situation is bad. There is homelessness everywhere. There is drug addiction. There are urban aboriginal people on the streets in the west who live a dire existence in absolute poverty. They are depending on the city to provide for them, when of course the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to provide for them. The aboriginal people move into cities and there are problems. We have to focus on funding cities in a stable manner, so that the cities can deal with some of these challenges and problems.
We talk about simple things such as health care and water. Everyone talks about clean water as if it is some sort of wonderful thing that suddenly it was decided that Canadians must have to drink. This is not new. This is a basic, fundamental human right.
Many of us remember the Harris government in Ontario. We know that the present federal Minister of Finance was the minister of finance in that government. This is the kind of attitude that government had in those days. We remember Walkerton. We see how Toronto, a great city of Canada, is now literally on its knees. The city is trying to fix things, trying to provide housing and infrastructure. There are transit problems. The cities are getting bigger and bigger and the problems will get worse.
When we talk about infrastructure, it is not simply roads and bridges. We are talking about all the social infrastructure. I recall that the Liberal government during the last election talked about how big cities needed law enforcement. We have to take some kind of responsibility for dealing with crime, guns, the kinds of things that have been going on in our cities. The previous Liberal government said that it would help to provide police in our cities. I remember when the Conservative government made a promise about police. The first thing that the government said in its last budget was, “Don't look at us. We gave money to the provinces. Let them hand it over to the cities. Let them look after the cities”. It is that kind of arrogant attitude that says, “Let them eat cake, and if the cities have a problem, let them go to the provinces on their knees and beg for crumbs”. All of this is happening when the provinces themselves are having to deal with some of the major issues.
All of this is smoke and mirrors when the government says that it gave $33 billion over a period of time. We know that many of those are purely federal initiatives, things that the federal government should be doing anyway.
Today's motion talks about giving cities, communities and municipalities the opportunity to build, the opportunity to grow and the opportunity to provide people with all the things that we talked about that they need to provide.
We talked about the fact that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities came to the federal government with a plan. The municipalities have long term plans. These are accountable people. We can tie in accountability and in other words make sure that the money is spent on certain things, but not attach the kind of strings that the government is attaching. The federal government says that they cannot do certain things with the money. They cannot spend it on housing. They must only spend it on the things that the federal government thinks they should spend it on. This is so degrading to duly elected municipal representatives who have to deliver to their people.
I know the Conservatives do not like to do anything the Liberals suggest. They seem to think that we do not do things right, but history has shown that we have done things right. The municipalities were very pleased with our new deal for cities. I am suggesting that for once the Conservatives park their bias at the door and give permanent funding through the gas tax to cities. Then the cities will be able to plan and build and will be able to sustain the quality of life for the people who live in those municipalities.