Mr. Speaker, it has been a long, lonely ride. It has been a ride over bad roads too, but that is another issue.
I have been at this now since 1995. Occasionally, I get whispers from the ministerial side that makes me think that I am making headway. However, it always seems to be not one step forward and two steps back, but one step forward and about five steps back. We get a lot of rhetoric and a lot of talk about infrastructure programs, but in the meantime the roads are crumbling, people are dying and nothing is happening.
What the country needs is some action. What the country needs is a Liberal like C.D. Howe to come back from the grave and show these guys how to run a country. Instead, we have these effete folks who like to have money to spend for their little projects: their millennium projects, their patronage deals, the Prime Minister's riding and the $800 million to subsidize the CBC television network and so on. But, something of substance, something we could look upon with pride and say “we built that, that is the Canadian national highway system” has not happened.
I am afraid that as long as these folks continue to occupy those chairs, it will not happen. We will still keep driving down to the United States. If we want to go from Mississauga to Vancouver, we start off through Michigan. This is the way it is. This is Canada. This is what we have to show for the tens of billions of dollars that have been sucked out of Canadian truckers and private motorists over the last few decades. To do what? To go into that great black hole known as general revenue, but not to do anything useful for the country. We cannot drive our cars safely on the national highway system.
I drove from Saskatchewan to Ottawa three years ago. While driving across northern Ontario on the Trans-Canada Highway, I lost a windshield and a shock absorber. Now that is beyond disgraceful. We are almost into the 21st century and still we cannot build a decent highway.
I have worked in a lot of third world countries. I can assure members that in many of them the main trunk artery is a damn sight better than the main trunk artery in Canada.
The hon. member for Etobicoke did contradict something I had said in my presentation. I quoted from a report of the Standing Committee on Transport, which in turn quoted the Minister of Finance as saying “yes, maybe we could look at dedicated revenue”. If the member does not believe me he can check that himself in the government document. I know that it is baloney because do I know this minister. If there is one thing he has it is a hard head and his hard head does not allow for any input from private members, from his caucus or from anybody else. He does not like dedicated taxes. To use the American terminology, when there is a fire wall around that money he cannot get his greedy hands on it. That is the whole idea of a fire wall.
I hope that, some day before I die, I will live to see a highway that one can safely and reasonably drive on, right from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But, I get discouraged. We have our surges in the country of activity. All of a sudden, back in the late 1870s and early 1880s, we build a railroad. It was a marvellous thing and we are still talking about it. From 1958 to 1962, we build a Trans-Canada Highway. It was a lot better then than it is now because it had not had 30 years to fall apart.
It is time we got out act together and started acting like a modern industrialized state, did something useful and permanent, and gave taxpayers something to show for all the money that is being scooped up by the government.