Mr. Speaker, I think you have already ruled on whether you heard unanimous consent or not. I would certainly defer to your expertise. That is your job to make that determination, not mine, and you have already done that, so there is no need to go back to that.
I am interested in what the parliamentary secretary had to say. We are going to do our job in this corner of the House and we are going to raise our concerns. We are not going to be put off that track because we do believe that we have raised serious issues and I can continue to do that.
I thought two things were notable about the commentary from his recent intervention. He said that the government put more money into infrastructure than any government in 60 years. That may well be true, but the reality is that it is not nearly enough.
The FCM, as I have pointed out, has said that there is a $123 billion infrastructure deficit and that the Conservatives have not even approached the very basic need in that regard.
There is a huge problem there. We have seen that the Conservatives have chosen to gut the physical capacity of our government, so that we cannot possibly meet those kinds of needs.
The government has chosen to give big tax breaks to large profitable corporations, instead of seeing to the needs of Canadian communities and their infrastructure needs. I do not think this serves us particularly well. I do not think it is anything to be particularly proud of.
There might be some humility in the ability of not being able to meet the infrastructure needs of Canadians and now we are setting up another major demand on that infrastructure funding by allowing the ports to compete with municipalities for that funding. It does not bode well for the needs of our communities.
He also said that the government had taken great pains to ensure cooperation between port authorities and municipalities, and that the port authority and board members were going to be told that they should operate in the best interests of those municipalities.
The reality is that the people elected to act in the best interests of those municipalities are municipal councillors, the members of city council, the local mayors. It is those people who have a direct mandate from the people of their communities to represent those interests. We believe that they should be very directly involved in the governance of port authorities. Because of that electoral mandate that they have from the people of their communities, they should be involved in that process.
We believe it should not be up to the goodwill of those people who are appointed to the boards of port authorities, but that it should be directly related to the mandates given by people in local elections to municipal elected officials.
That is a very important point I think that needs to be made in all of this and it is a deficiency of the legislation that we are debating today.