Thanks.
I think when you've been mayor of a large city—I was the mayor of Winnipeg—you look at the federal government's spending capacity and you just get overwhelmed. In the last term of Parliament, federal spending increased by nearly $40 billion. That's more money than all the major municipalities in Canada have to spend annually. Since then, the federal government's spending increase, not its total budget, is more than all municipal and regional municipalities--small, rural, large. You're now talking about one order of government that has increased its spending and imprint on the economy by more than one entire order of government spends, and that is increasing.
You have less money right now in Canada in the hands of municipalities than most others, and Canadian municipalities are twice as dependent on property taxes as any other source. We've been cutting consumption taxes and sales taxes. There is no appropriate carbon price. I don't know how you meet climate change without a carbon tax. You can call it anything you want, but people should be honest with people. I chaired the national round table. I was grilled by this committee. I think you got three years of excellent reports, and you didn't take any of the advice.
You need a carbon pricing policy that is coherent. You do. Because right now what you're publicly subsidizing in the federal government to an extraordinary level are brown buildings, sprawl, and brown technology. I would challenge you to do something, as a government. Look at how you're spending money and look at how you tax. Look at all the things that you want more of in this country--green energy, the kinds of things my friends from Alberta have--and then look at why it isn't happening.
There is a price barrier because you subsidize brown buildings; you put a premium on green buildings. Every single road, every single sewage and energy system in low-density areas when I was mayor, including in my own city, could get public subsidy because there are built-in green subsidies. People who live in highly transit-friendly neighbourhoods that are walkable, whether they're rural or urban, because there is a form for both, pay higher taxes and get less subsidy than any other group of Canadians. It's not a political issue--right or left, I don't care. There is an argument from either perspective to do that.
So that is one challenge.
I get back to the idea of planning, because I don't think you're going to pick the solutions. Mr. Chairman, from your own constituency you get a sense of the inventiveness of Canadians in solving problems.
These technologies that you've heard about all work, and they're all unique. I grew up not far from Benny Farm. If you have a framework, if you have a proper plan that lets these people know--because they can't decide what the most appropriate technology is for rural Alberta or for urban Montreal--if you actually provide an energy plan that identifies, that understands the geography, understands the age and nature of the buildings and gets the right technology solutions, and you spend through those plans and allow the projects to flow through those plans with provincial and federal support, your shovels-in-the-ground criterion--which I think was meant with the best of intentions to accelerate funding--is not going to work. If you fund the plans on the tables rather than the shovels in the ground, you'll get a lot more happening, because you'll allow the private, public, and non-profit sectors to accelerate these things and you'll unleash the creativity that you sought here.
That's how I would structure my approach to federal spending if I were in your shoes, which I'm not.