Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to the motion by the member for Brandon—Souris. I will first read the motion, so we can put the debate in context.
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should apply a portion of tax dollars raised on fuel sales to the maintenance of the rural road system in Canada.
When we first read the motion, we tend to want to support it, because when as members we realize that the rural road system in our riding, in our region, is not necessarily adequate, we feel that something should be done.
Unfortunately, it is like knocking at the wrong door. The federal government should not be looking after the rural road system. We have increasingly of late been looking at the possibly of developing a home care system, which the government would look after across Canada.
The situation is the same in the case of the rural road system. It is under provincial jurisdiction, and if there is one government not equipped to look after it, it is the federal government. We need only look at the past mess in the whole business of federal government transportation policy development.
In my riding, they decided some 15 years ago to close a railway line. That put huge pressure on the road system and resulted in endless numbers of trucks on the road. Now, we are having to repair the road in question.
The province has to pay for the bad choice by the federal government because the regional road system needs to be maintained.
I think we have to put things in perspective. The jurisdiction is provincial and the responsibility, municipal. A whole process already exists to manage this sort of thing.
If there is a model or an approach for the future we might contemplate, it might well be the infrastructure program. The Bloc has already indicated its support for renewal of this program. It earned the congratulations of the President of the Treasury Board, who said to us on April 3, following our request, that he appreciated the Bloc Quebecois' support for the Canada-Quebec infrastructure works program and wanted to assure us that our viewpoint would be given all due consideration when the federal government examined the options for the future of the program.
This might be an approach. If the federal government wants to spend a third of the money in such a program and leave it up to the local level to decide its priorities and how best to improve its regional network, this might be the way to go.
However, this arrangement must not provide for programs that would allow the federal government to intervene directly in the rural network. This would be in contradiction to its recent practice in the transportation sector of divesting itself of ports and airports.
Over the past 30 years of administration, we have seen that costs have skyrocketed. Costs are always higher and things are always more complicated when the government which has the jurisdiction is further removed from the reality and costs are always lower when the closer government assumes responsibility and accountability for the work done.
So, there is perhaps another approach to be considered. In the end, it is always the same consumer who pays. If people want a good rural road system and if they want the appropriate level of government, be it municipal or provincial, to have the money available, the federal government could simply reduce its tax grab and allow the government responsible for developing the rural road system to collect the money.
Unfortunately, the solution proposed will not correct a very real problem. If people decide to let the federal government invest in this project, they will never be able to ensure that it is accountable and that the money collected has actually been spent on the rural road system.
Like the member for Brandon—Souris, I have examples in my riding of manufacturers that could benefit from a better rural road system. In Saint-Joseph-de-Kamouraska, there is a small company located on a rural route that needs a better road system for reasons of improved accessibility. This would help with its economic activity, the development of its markets and the transportation of the goods it produces. In the case of examples such as these, I think that something should obviously be done.
Another example in my riding is highway 185 between Rivière-du-Loup and New Brunswick. This highway has experienced an incredible increase in car traffic because of the improvement in communications and the fact that the Rivière-du-Loup sector, among others, is a regional transportation pole. We would like to see additional money invested in this area.
I think that no one in our region would criticize the federal government for deciding all of a sudden not to go ahead with the purchase of submarines for $750 million but rather to make this amount available to local governments to help improve the highway system.
In Canada, the highway system was developed after the railway system, which had itself been developed along an east-west axis that no longer meets current development priorities.
The road system must be developed on a north-south axis so we can travel from Vancouver to Seattle, from the western provinces to the U.S. Midwest, or from Ontario and Quebec to New England, which would ensure better access to the North American market and promote exportation.
In this respect, the federal government should ask itself whether it is really investing in the right areas.
Let us avoid asking the federal government to intervene in the rural road system in Canada. It lacks the efficiency for this. Besides, this is not its responsibility. It is a provincial responsibility, a municipal responsibility. The proof of this lies in the implementation of the first phase of the infrastructure program.
In my riding, we have spent money on projects in a number of municipalities, and since the municipality was in charge of the project, the work could often be done at half the cost it would have been for a higher level of government to do it.
The local government knows what is required. It knows what is needed, it knows what additional resources are needed to get results. But let us not get federal government money involved. We will lose more in administration costs than we will gain in actual investment in the project.
We have already seen this in the past, systems that cost so much to administer that the funds do not get to those they are intended to help.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that I recognize the good intentions of the hon. member behind this motion, but I do not see this as the right solution to a real problem. The real solution lies more in getting the federal government to look after its own affairs a little more, to ensure that it runs its own affairs more efficiently, to agree to decrease the tax burden on Canadians, so that the governments responsible for such projects will be the ones to levy taxes as they are needed.
The road system, whether rural, provincial, or Canada-wide, is an essential tool of economic development, and when the federal government said that it would subject all of its actions to the criterion of rural impact, I trust that this was not with the intent of intervening in areas in which it cannot be efficient.