The intention in what people do and the results are not always the same thing.
I'll give you an example from when I was mayor, because I know that best. In Winnipeg, every time there was a federal infrastructure program.... And they're not bad things. Thank God the federal government got involved in them. And I'm not making any partisan comment, because I think, quite frankly, all of us who have been in politics wear this fairly equally. Everyone gets money. We have the great peanut butter theory in Canada. Everyone gets the same amount of money for the same thing, which has, I think, been a disaster.
So areas that already have roads and bridges and sewers and water get money that goes into repairing broken water, sewer, and that. I won't get into it, but there have been all kinds of processes in Canada in public policy and taxation that have undermined the success of large urban downtowns in larger cities and destroyed the main streets of many small rural communities.
We subsidize. And I don't have time, but if you want us to write a brief on that, I'll submit it--about the tax system and how the way provincial and federal governments together spend money and tax has created a fundamental disadvantage. One of them is the way the assessment system works.
When provincial governments assess property, they assess buildings very heavily and land very lightly. So a Wal-Mart parking lot isn't taxed very much, but a Hudson's Bay, or in Montreal, the old Dupuis Frères store, lot to lot, pay huge taxes on their buildings. High-density residential and commercial pay 150% to 200% more property taxes than low-density cinder-block buildings in peripheral industrial parks that you cannot service with public transit.
I could go on through provincial sales tax, federal income tax, federal corporate tax. I would tell you I haven't been able to find a tax in Canada that doesn't have an anti-urban, anti-rural bias. It subsidizes low-density, auto-dependent.... It also subsidizes different energy choices.
Direct federal spending, when we get into the shovels-in-the-ground mentality--this isn't the first time, and I don't think anyone's clean on this one, because every party of every stripe in almost every government has used that argument in that exact language--skips through planning and skips through regulatory process.
I think when that happens and everyone gets the same thing.... What was happening was that the sewage treatment plant built outside the city of Winnipeg, or the subsidization of natural gas extension, or a large road that no one could reasonably afford to build, or the subsidy of trunk water and sewer to low-density.... It's not picked up on the property taxes or on the utility bills of those homeowners. It's heavily subsidized by the federal and provincial governments, which makes that development now affordable when it wouldn't be. What it does is it now makes the existing service land in the urban area or in the small rural community that already has services lose its competitive advantage. Because now what you've done is you've taken an area that was unserviced, that wasn't economical to service, that the market wouldn't support and isn't a good environmental choice, and you've had the big hand of provincial and federal governments lower the cost of it using federal and provincial spending undermine to make it equally or less expensive to develop on that kind of land. So you're subsidizing sprawl in that sense.
You can look at natural gas pipeline extensions in small communities. You can look at a sewage treatment plant that was built just outside of Winnipeg that gave them the cheapest water and sewer in Manitoba, and they didn't have to pay for it. And everyone else, whether they were in Portage la Prairie or in Winnipeg, had to pay for their own water and sewer and have higher rates. That's what I mean by perverse subsidy.
I will close by simply saying one last sentence, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate your indulgence.
The International Institute on Sustainable Development, set up by the Mulroney government, did a major paper on perverse subsidy in Canada, and it would answer your question across the country in detail, a case-by-case of how that works.
Thank you, sir.