The Federation of Canadian Municipalities put forward a budget request and presented a very compelling case. They presented an economic report showing that for every billion dollars of spending on infrastructure 11,000 jobs could be created directly. We accepted that.
Obviously, if we had used the gas tax model, demonstrably less money would have been spent. By leveraging money from the provinces.... Every province stepped up to the plate. Liberal, NDP, Conservative, every single province and all three northern territories stepped up to the plate and matched our infrastructure spending.
The municipalities will always say to give them the money directly, to just skip the middleman and send them all the money. If you talk to the provinces, they'll say that the federal government only has to write 13 cheques, so just give the money to them in the form of a trust. If you talk to the colleges and universities, they say they can move much faster than the municipalities, so give them all the money.
We took a balanced approach. We doubled the gas tax money, which was the direct transfer to municipalities. We moved up the first payment to April from July. We kept the promise to double it, we made it permanent, and we advanced the payments by as much as three months. We brought in the new stimulus initiatives. We've literally gone 10 times faster.
In 2003, the Liberal government brought in some new infrastructure programs, and in late 2006 Lawrence Cannon was still signing agreements with the provinces. None of it had been spent in three years.
It's not perfect, and it's not like flicking a light switch, but I'll tell you that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities had their board meeting two weeks ago and they had a party for the staff at Infrastructure Canada to thank the officials for their extraordinary work. If you had said to me that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities would be celebrating the success of the federal bureaucracy, I wouldn't have believed it. The department's done an amazing job of responding to this challenge.
Is it perfect? No. Whenever you have intergovernmental negotiations, it's going to take a little bit of time, but I'll tell you, the George Smithermans and the Danny Williams of the world put aside partisan politics and worked constructively. Darrell Dexter, the new NDP premier of Nova Scotia, is a pleasure to work with, as is his Minister Estabrooks. We're getting things done. We've had good partnerships.
It hasn't been perfect. Do I wish we could have announced every single project in a month? No. We have some due diligence to do on the projects. It's been important. It's been outstanding. I think we wanted to get a lot of federal infrastructure projects going and as quickly as we possibly could.
This is 10 times faster than the last two programs under this and the previous governments and we're seeing things happen around the country. We haven't hired an army of new bureaucrats to ask where the steel was bought and how many jobs were created by a ton of steel. It would be a bureaucratic nightmare.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office is just a joke, because they have no ability to track whether the information is true or is just made up as people go along. I can tell you that if you drive around my province of Ontario you can see construction projects everywhere, because the province has worked well. Every success we've had in working with the provinces is a success of the provincial government as well.
When we came forward with that model, Parliament said yes. Conservative and Liberal members voted not to use the gas tax. They voted for the budget that had this model. I think the FCM and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario are pretty pleased, generally speaking, with the success of the initiatives.
I've already said to them, “Let's look at what we've learned over this past year and what we can do to benefit from it in the future”. I mean, the one-page application form, the improved political cooperation, they've been incredible.
