Mr. Speaker, leading in to a question for the hon. member, I would like to comment on the previous speech by the member for Vancouver East. I do not know if she was confused and got her facts backward but she said, and I assume she is referring to British Columbia, her province and mine, that there are subsidies for private motor vehicles and subsidies for the highways but unfortunately no subsidies for public transportation.
It is the exact opposite. Public transportation in British Columbia, particularly in the lower mainland in the area she is from in Vancouver, is heavily subsidized. On the price of gas alone that the private vehicles buy, there is an extra two cents a litre to help pay for that, so it is the exact opposite.
This goes to a question I asked a government member earlier and I address it now to the member. We need a good highway infrastructure system in order to get our economy working to travel east and west within Canada and north and south across the border. We have a tremendous amount of cross-border traffic. We need a much better highway system.
The federal government spends about $200 million per year on national highway infrastructure. In British Columbia alone it extracts $1 billion out of the province in fuel tax which was put on ostensibly as a highway tax to build and maintain our highway infrastructure. That is just the federal tax.
I would ask the hon. member what she thinks would be fair. Perhaps we could come up with some kind of system so that her government puts back some of the money so that we can spend it directly on the very sector it was taken from, the public transportation sector. Then we could have better infrastructure in order to move the goods to create the wealth that pays the taxes that keeps the government going.