I'm not the finance minister, so I don't write the budget on this, but we've been able to point to the fact—and I mentioned it in my remarks—that infrastructure needs to be a lot more than stimulus spending. We know that; it needs to be long term.
That's why our last major infrastructure plan was seven years long. That's also why we've doubled the gas tax for municipalities and made it permanent. There's $2 billion a year there that they can lever and count on in the long term. Those are some things that are not just in the window; they're reality. So folks can already plan on that.
That being said, there's obviously a desire, both from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and from the engineers and from the Canadian Public Works Association, and from others, for long-term planning for infrastructure needs. This stimulus funding was necessary, and they all welcomed it and have all lauded it and said it was a great thing. But they also understand, as do we, that it's not the way to fix long-term infrastructure needs.
It was also brought up at the federal-provincial transport and infrastructure ministers' meeting in Halifax a month ago. So there's a common thread running through this: people want to get together and plan long term. I think that's a good idea.
Just to assure them, things don't end on March 31; things continue. It's business as usual, and they should count on that. But certainly in the longer term, we need to sit down with all of the stakeholders, as we've done in the case of the Pacific gateway, as a good example, to see what parts of it are infrastructure-related, regulatory, jurisdictional, and so on, to see what part we can all play in that.