Thank you, Mr. Morantz. It's great to be here again. It's great as well to see a fellow Winnipegger.
I will say this. The Winnipeg chamber, along with eight of the largest metropolitan chambers in this country, formed the Canadian Global Cities Council in 2016. In 2018 we produced a report that received national coverage and called for a national urban strategy. Canada has the distinction of being one of two OECD nations, the other being the United States, that does not have a national urban strategy.
Effectively, what that's calling for is moving away from project-based funding, whereby communities like Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal—you name them—would work with their provincial counterparts and develop local regional plans for those communities, which the federal government would fund. If the priorities shift in concert with the municipality and the province and you've had something change, you don't need to keep going back to Ottawa, because Ottawa is funding the plan and the priorities as set by the local communities themselves.
That's one way, I think, that the government can transform how it funds infrastructure in this country. It's to ask the communities what their priorities are and to say, “Put it in a plan and we'll fund the plan.”