Mr. Speaker, may I indicate to the Chair and to the House that government members speaking on this motion will be dividing their time for the remainder of the debate.
I am pleased to have this opportunity to rise in the House and address this motion. On February 22 the Minister of Finance tabled the government's first budget. It was a budget based on, as the minister said at that time, an unprecedented process of consultation with Canadians.
What we as a government have put before the House and before the Canadian people in our first budget is only a first step. It will not solve everything overnight but it will provide a basis that we can build on. This is not a simplistic unidimensional step. It is the first step to economic recovery, to the well-being of individual Canadians and to the elimination of the deficit.
We have listened to Canadians. We are pursuing our game plan and it includes jobs and growth. During the election campaign we made very clear the solutions we were proposing and we are following through on these commitments.
Members opposite would have you believe that they somehow hold some kind of secret solution. Yet their only solution is to cut. This is a scorched earth policy and we feel, frankly, that what Canadians said on October 25, 1993 was that they were burned enough by that approach.
One of the best examples of what can be expected from the government is a positive, constructive program, the infrastructure program. Infrastructure Works is a shared cost initiative which brings all levels of government together working on opportunities for Canadians, working on job creation, working on investing in the very foundation of our economic prosperity for the future.
Each level of government, federal, provincial and territorial, and municipal will contribute $2 billion for a total of $6 billion over the next two years. This is what Canadians want to see, governments co-operating to solve our problems, not governments at each other's throats, competing with each other. The program is also open to private sector investment in these public purpose initiatives, if such investment is useful and can assist local governments.
A federal share has been allocated to each province and territory based on a formula melding population and unemployment shares, a formula I might add that was agreed to by all first ministers in December. Each province and territory will match the federal allocation as will local governments.
Infrastructure Works is intended to speed the economic recovery while meeting the well documented needs of renewing and upgrading Canada's infrastructure. The program should help municipalities and communities use new, efficient and environmentally sound technologies as well as improve our competitiveness and productivity.
There has been a dramatic decline in what we have invested in infrastructure over the last few decades. In the 1960s the three levels of government invested 4.3 per cent of gross domestic product in infrastructure. This declined in the 1980s to 2.5 per cent.
Many members in the House and I have substantial municipal experience. We know from experience that a road not repaired and maintained today means one spends 10 times as much when that road falls apart. We know that allowing bridges to rust and collapse means a much bigger burden for the next generation than the cost of repairing that infrastructure today. We know that unhealthy water systems in our communities are neither in the best interests of this generation or the next, nor is it responsible of us to leave that burden to the next generation.
We have just started to renew the Great Lakes clean-up agreement with the province of Ontario. The province has stressed to us and the International Joint Commission has stressed the important contribution that this program can make to cleaning up our lakes and rivers by having sound water and sewage systems. These are not inconsequential projects now or for the future. These are a protection of our future.
There are communities right in this region that cannot develop their industrial parks because they still have old wooden sewers from the last century. Those are the kinds of investments that are going to be made under the infrastructure program. They will allow the communities of Canada to prosper and grow and provide employment to this generation and provide a sure economic future for the next generation.
This program is going to create jobs immediately. Directly up to 65,000 jobs will be created in the municipal infrastructure program and with indirect jobs many more than that. That is what the desperate people out there wanting employment, wanting a better future for themselves and their children, wanting to see the government doing, and that is what we are doing.
This is a program municipalities have wanted for 10 years. I was sitting on the national board of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 1983. We were gathering information to demonstrate the deteriorating nature of the infrastructure of Canada and the negative impact it was having on our potential for economic growth and jobs and a better future for our citizens. Ten years ago the municipalities and the provinces agreed that this program was what was needed across our country. The government is implementing it and will make it a success for every community across the country. Yet that is the program endorsed by every municipality the members on the opposite side by this motion want to cancel.
They also want to pretend that this is new money we are spending. Liberals are responsible in government. We know that if we want to implement a new program, and Infrastructure Works is a new program, then we have to reorder our priorities and that is what we have done.
We have not increased spending, no matter what the members on the other side want to pretend, to create this program. We have changed other priorities. We have cut other spending programs because we know that this program is important.
There could be no more ideal time for this kind of investment. National unemployment is at an unacceptable level. This is a terrible waste of human talent, a constant stress on hundreds of thousands of households across Canada. Infrastructure Works will have a significant impact on unemployment.
The government believes it should keep its promises. We should put Canadians back to work. We should allow our communities to use the new and innovative technologies in the upgrading of water and sewage treatments that are going to provide new opportunities for Canada in the future.
This program is an investment in the future; in the future of individual Canadians, in the future of our communities and in the future of our nation.