Mr. Speaker, as the New Democratic Party transportation critic, it is an honour to speak in support of this motion.
I begin by thanking the hon. member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands for bringing this motion before the House. I put in a very similar motion about a year ago. I know the hon. member submitted this motion when he was still his party's transportation critic and I am glad to see he decided to follow through in this area even though he is no longer the transportation critic.
As any Canadian driver will tell us, the highways in our country are in terrible shape. The Liberal government has abandoned its duty to maintain safe and adequate roads. It has abandoned our highways just as it has abandoned health care, education, homeless children, first nations, farmers, the RCMP and so many other vital areas.
We all know the finance minister said that he would balance the budget come hell or high water. In my home province of Manitoba we have seen high water in two disastrous floods and thanks to the Liberal government, driving on our roads is hell.
Canada is the only country in the developed world that does not have a national highway program. It is truly pathetic. When it comes to highways, Canada is dead last. Not only are we last, but we are not even close to most other countries we need to compete with for investment.
The United States spends six times as much per kilometre as Canada on maintaining and expanding its national highway system. Britain spends four times as much per kilometre. Our G-7 competitors like Germany, France and Italy all spend five to ten times as much as Canada does on their national highways systems.
It is important to point out exactly what we mean by the national highway system. We are not talking about every road in the country. The national highway system makes up 3% of Canada's roads. This 3% of our highways carries over 25% of all highway traffic in the country.
The national highway system has been a federal responsibility ever since the Canadian Highways Act was passed in 1919. The provinces are responsible for the other 97% of our roads. Is it too much to ask that this Liberal government do its job and maintain that measly 3% it is responsible for?
Because of the Liberal government's abandonment of highways, the provinces have had to pick up the slack as best they can. Unfortunately the provinces have also had to pick up the slack for all the other Liberal government cuts, cuts to health care, cuts to education, cuts to housing, cuts to policing. The Liberal government has cut so much, the provinces have not been able to keep up.
It should not be a shock but the regions that are getting ripped off the most by the Liberal government are, as usual, the west and the north. Between now and 2001 the four western provinces and the three territories combined will only see $13 million in Transport Canada money for highways, with $6 million going to B.C., $5 million to the territories, and $2 million to Saskatchewan. Manitoba and Alberta are not getting one red cent. If we drive down the road in Manitoba and we have to stop on a dime, we know for sure that it is a provincial dime because the federal transport department invests not one red cent.
Why do we need good highways? Why is the national system something the government needs to make a priority? There are three main reasons: safety, the environment and the economy.
First I will talk about safety because it is the most important reason. At a bare minimum Canadians should be able to drive safely but many of our roads simply are not safe enough. Thirty-eight per cent of the national highway system is substandard. Right now over 1,100 bridges on the national highway system need repair.
I am reminded of two summers ago during our summer recess. There was an article in which a beaver was being blamed for the breakdown of part of the Trans-Canada Highway. A beaver had made a dam which had damaged the road. I thought, one would think someone was out there maintaining that road, but no, the beaver was blamed for the breakdown of the highway. It is like blaming the cow for the spilled milk.
It is true that overall the number of deaths on Canadian roads has been decreasing since the seventies, and that is a good thing. The Liberal government points to this statistic and says, “See, the roads are getting safer”. We know that is simply not true. The government is misrepresenting the numbers.
The reason the number of deaths on the roads has been dropping since the seventies is because the rate of seatbelt use has gone up and the rate of drunk driving has dropped.
If the Liberal government would bring the national highway system up to a minimum standard, the number of accidents this would prevent would save an average of 247 lives and 16,000 injuries every year. Even one preventable death or injury is too many.
It is appalling that the Liberal government is continuing to neglect our highways when Canadians are dying on our substandard roads.
The second reason to improve highways is to help the environment. Transportation fuel is responsible for over half of our nation's greenhouse gas emissions. We have to bring this down to meet our commitments under the Kyoto agreement and stop global warming.
Bringing the national highway system up to minimum standards would save over 230 million litres of fuel each year. This alone would not be enough to meet our commitments to stop global warming, but it would be an important start.
We also need to switch to greener forms of transportation, such as rail and mass transit, particularly in big cities. But many Canadians, particularly in rural and northern areas like my riding of Churchill, absolutely need to drive, so the Liberal government has a responsibility to invest in highways.
The third reason to fix the national highway system is that of economics. I do not expect the Liberal government to listen to my arguments about the need to save Canadians' lives. If the government really cared about saving Canadians' lives it would not have cut health care by $25 billion since 1995. I also do not expect it to listen to my arguments about saving the environment because the Liberal government's record on the environment is terrible. But I do know that the Liberal government listens to the bottom-line economic arguments, so here they are.
First, highways are good for business. Most of Canada's manufactured goods are transported by road. Companies setting up plants look for access to good roads. That is one of the reasons the economy is now booming in the U.S., while many hundreds of thousands of Canadians are still out of work.
The U.S. knows the benefits of investing in highways. Bad roads also discourage tourism, which is an important industry in many parts of our country. Many truckers and other travellers going across Canada prefer to go south, cut across the U.S. and then come back up to Canada. This means that on their trip they buy U.S. gas, stay in U.S. motels, eat in U.S. restaurants and pay taxes to the U.S. government instead of to the Canadian government.
It would cost about $13 billion to bring the national highway system to minimum standards. That is a lot of money, but if we spread it out over a number of years it is something the government could well afford within the budget surplus. Not only that, in the long run improving our highways would save money, not cost money. Preventable accidents cost more than $25 billion each year in emergency health care for victims, long term health care and other costs, such as property damage and lost productivity.
The health care savings alone would pay for the cost of fixing the national highway system, not to mention the benefits of the increased economic activity that better roads would lead to, particularly job creation, something Canadians badly need.
I conclude my remarks by repeating my support for the motion. The Liberal government has abandoned its responsibility for national highways. By doing so it has put the lives and health of Canadians at risk. It has also squandered the many economic benefits that come from having good highways.
The motion calls for dedicating a modest 20% of income from fuel taxes to highway improvements. Normally I would not support dedicated taxation. However, as we have seen with the way the Liberal government has misused Canadians' employment insurance money, we cannot trust the Liberal government to use Canadians' money for what it is intended. Twenty per cent of fuel taxes is a reasonable base line and the Liberal government has no excuse not to invest at least that much in our highways.