It is the Trans-Canada Highway between Golden and Field, B.C. One would expect that this piece of road would have been fixed. I have been driving it for probably four decades and there has not been any great improvement in the road. Imagine a two-lane road, the Trans-Canada Highway, that is that dangerous and yet it has not been fixed. The question is, why? Clearly it is a function of money.
Every province has its killer chunk of highway, as my hon. colleague mentioned earlier. We all know that there is one where each of us comes from. Whether it is down around Windsor, in the maritimes or across the prairies, there are chunks of the main highways of this country which are clearly dangerous. They are killing people. How are we going to address that? How are we going to fix that up?
There are a couple of ways. One is dedicated revenues, which I agree with. I am not a big fan of dedicated revenues but I think in this case it is correct. Another way would be toll roads. The Americans do some of that. We tried it for example with the Coquihalla highway which was built for Expo '86 basically to feed the lower mainland during Expo. My understanding is that it has been paid for seven times over. The provincial government is now looking at it as a cash cow.
Toll roads have opportunities but they tend to get abused. Again it brings up the question of double taxation because we are taxed already on our fuel taxes. Why should we be then taxed to use the road?
I would like to use the American model because I believe the Americans have excellent roads. They have dedicated revenues. They have found the prescription that is fair. My NDP colleague was commenting earlier about areas like Manitoba that get no revenues, that are getting no money this year in the budget. The Americans solved that by doing it on the number of miles of roads. Some poor areas such as Mississippi and Arkansas because of their tax bases and their situations cannot afford to put the money into roads, but the national system does it on a per mile basis.
If we transferred that formula to Canada, where Saskatchewan and Manitoba are having trouble in getting finances, this formula would solve it. There would be dedicated revenues and the national highway system would be fixed up. That is a good formula we can look toward.
My colleague from the Liberal Party commented earlier that it was in the budget and he is not supporting it but to my mind it is too little too late. We have to address the system. Certainly the budget is dedicating some revenue and I do not quarrel with that, but it is not dedicating nearly enough revenue toward highways. We are putting back about 5% of what we take in taxation revenue just from fuel. That is wrong. Fuels are not a cash cow. They simply need to be put back into the system.
There are areas like Windsor where 10,000 trucks a day are coming across the bridge and are being dumped into downtown Windsor. This is not a freeway system; basically they are municipal roads. In situations like that, there is a bottleneck. NAFTA is clearly going to expand and there will be more trucks. We should fix the situation. We can deal with it with dedicated revenues.
In many ways the government is missing the point. The point is where do we direct our tax revenues from gasoline, from diesel? Do they go into general revenues, into the main pot? Do they go, as most of us in the House would agree with, back into the highway system? We do not need a Cadillac system, the same as that of the Americans. But we certainly do not need roads that are going to be like those of a banana republic if we keep going the way we have been for the next 10 years.
I support my colleague. It is a good idea. In fact, I would ask unanimous consent of the House that this motion be votable.