Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
I'm a mayor in the municipality of Southwest Middlesex, a councillor with Middlesex County, and president of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario.
AMO believes that all three orders of government must work together to build a strong and competitive nation. It's a shared responsibility that no one level of government can accomplish alone. Now is the time to act, and it's essential that all governments be present and accounted for as we move ahead to address key issues that we face.
As the providers of service, municipalities are where many issues of national importance intersect. These services include public transit, immigration settlement, environmental protection, public health, affordable housing, income support, child care, and public safety. In many cases, it's the municipal government that provides other orders of government with local service delivery capacity.
Municipalities recognize the tremendous progress that has been made in recent years on the GST rebate, affordable housing, transit investment, and the federal gas tax transfer, to name a few examples. We recognize that competing demands and limited fiscal resources are a reality for each order of government.
While Ontario's municipal governments are proud of our contributions across Canada, we believe Ontario should be treated fairly by the federal government. The federal-provincial fiscal imbalance in Ontario has a direct impact on municipal governments. The property tax base in Ontario is simply insufficient to meet all the needs of our communities and a growing country.
In Ontario, we have the compounding problem of the province's reliance on property taxes to fund a range of provincial health and social services. Fixing the federal-provincial fiscal imbalance will allow the Ontario government to end its reliance on municipal property taxes--a reliance that costs Ontario municipal property taxpayers more than $3 billion each year.
Over the past few months, more than 100 municipal governments in Ontario have passed resolutions that this committee should consider as part of its deliberations. Those resolutions support Premier McGuinty's position on the federal-provincial fiscal imbalance and his position that federal funding programs should be allocated to provinces and territories on a per capita basis.
Municipal infrastructure is the foundation of our local, provincial, and national economies. But in Ontario we face a massive and growing municipal infrastructure deficit, estimated at about $5 billion a year--one that limits our ability to provide safe, clean water, to protect the environment, and to provide reliable transit and efficient transportation networks. Municipalities are grappling with the needs to replace aging transit infrastructure while expanding municipal systems and integrating municipal commuter, intercity transit, and high-speed rail systems. Investment in transit is one of the best strategies for limiting congestion, for improving environmental outcomes, and for keeping our economy strong.
The availability of affordable housing is also critical to our country's economic competitiveness. High housing costs affect labour markets, labour mobility, and the successful integration of new Canadians. Lack of affordable housing and increasing homelessness affect the competitiveness of local communities and compromise the quality of life for our citizens. A national and long-term strategy to provide affordable housing and sustained funding to support homeless initiatives, including programs such as the Supporting Communities Partnership initiative, make good economic sense.
A great deal needs to be done if Ontario communities are to be livable, sustainable, and competitive in the national and global marketplace. The municipal sector must play a further part in determining infrastructure investment priorities. It must see a demonstrable commitment for a national, long-term, sustainable funding approach that will help us plan and budget infrastructure capital and maintenance and eliminate the municipal infrastructure deficit over time.
In Ontario we have gained an important role in guiding provincial and federal investment in local infrastructure through our memorandum of understanding with the province and through our role in helping to develop federal gas tax revenue sharing, an important new source of funding that must be made permanent.
The upcoming budget is an opportunity to renew the federal interest in strong communities. Ontario's communities provide an important foundation for the national economy. Strengthening that foundation begins at the local level.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.