Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise and address this issue today.
I want to congratulate my friend from Port Moody--Coquitlam--Port Coquitlam for his speech and for leading off the debate today. He has made a number of good points, but before I get into the reasons why we are promoting this motion, let me read a previous motion that he put forward in June so people understand what we are talking about. The motion stated:
That, in the opinion of this House, Canada's infrastructure needs should be met by a regime of stable funding; and that accordingly, this House call on the government to reduce federal gasoline taxes conditional on an agreement with provinces that, with the creation of this tax room, provinces would introduce a special tax to fund infrastructure in provincial and municipal jurisdictions.
I want to start by just reminding the House how important this is. My friend was talking a minute ago about some of the problems in his riding and in British Columbia with respect to the lack of funding for roads that has caused all kinds of safety problems.
My riding of Medicine Hat is right on Highway 1. If one travels the highway into Saskatchewan, all of a sudden it goes from a great divided highway into a two lane highway, the Trans-Canada Highway. For years and years that stretch of highway between the Saskatchewan border and Swift Current was a two lane highway with no division, and there have been hundreds of accidents on it.
Remember this is the Trans-Canada Highway and a tremendous volume of traffic goes up and down that road. However because of inadequate funding, lives were lost there every year. It is only now that we have started to get to the point where that road is being divided and we will have a proper highway, but it still not complete. It still has a long way to go.
Saskatchewan of course is not really in a position to fund that by itself. Year after year it has been calling on the federal government to devote some of the money that comes out of excise tax in Saskatchewan to the roads in Saskatchewan, which is hardly unreasonable. If that had happened, I would argue that countless lives could have been saved. However it did not happen, and still has not happened, and people, to some degree, take their lives in their hands when they go down that stretch of highway. It is extraordinarily dangerous and that is the most powerful argument I can make for the government to move ahead and approve this motion. We need it.
I also want to point out that with the end of the Crow rate, we have had a lot more trucking of grain in the prairie provinces. A lot of cattle liners move up and down the highway, not as many as there used to be with the BSE crisis. Typically that is what happens. I live just off Highway 36 in Alberta and I see those cattle liners going up and down that road all the time. They beat up those roads pretty good but it is not like they do not pay the taxes necessary to pay for the upkeep of those roads. The problem is the taxes do not get back from the federal government into those roads.
As my friend pointed out a minute ago, only a couple per cent from the federal government is put back into highways in Canada and that is a disgrace. The point is this. If the government taxes a specific commodity, in this case fuel, to such a degree that it does, at 10¢ on average in excise tax, the expectation is that money should go back into looking after, in this case, highway infrastructure. I think that is reasonable.
What we really have here is almost a case of bait and switch. People pay the tax with the understanding that it will come back in the form of better roads, but all of a sudden there is a switch and the money goes into general revenues, never to be seen again. It is not like all those general revenues are devoted to things that people want. Yes, we want good health care and yes, we want good national defence. However lately there has been an endless list of scandals where that money has gone to all kinds of things that people would argue have nothing to do with their priorities. In fact some of them are outright scams. They are scandals at the very least.
Clearly, all of that money is not spent on things that are high priorities. There is a very good argument to be made that this money must start coming back to the provinces so that municipalities can provide some of these services. Roads need to be paved and that type of infrastructure not only provides people with safety but also leads to a good economy. We must have good infrastructure if we want to have the easy transport of goods and services in our country. This leads to a much stronger economy. I would argue that the government has failed us in that respect.
One of the things that is most striking about this debate is the hypocrisy of the government. We brought forward a motion in the spring that effectively argued what we are arguing today. The government voted against it. We have the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance getting up and criticizing us. He voted against that motion and so did the member for LaSalle--Émard, the new Liberal leader. They voted against it in the spring, but now they are proposing something very similar to it and swallowing themselves whole.
I will be very interested to see how they vote tonight. It will be amazing. If they vote against it, they will be voting against what the former finance minister, the new Liberal leader, is arguing for. If they vote in favour of it, why did they not support it in the spring? Why would they not support it all those years ago? We have been arguing for this for years.
The Liberals across the way have been playing politics with this and they do not care about doing what is right. They care about doing what is politically convenient for them. It has nothing to do with what is clearly right economically and clearly right from the standpoint of providing public safety. What they are doing is covering their rear ends as it suits them, and I am afraid to say that the public pays a big price as a result of that.
I want to point out that it is not this way in all jurisdictions. My friend has pointed out that the provinces are extraordinarily good about turning about 92% or so of the sales tax, the excise tax, on gasoline back to roads and infrastructure. In other jurisdictions in the U.S. it is something like 84% that is turned back out of their excise taxes. These jurisdictions are very responsible. The only one that is not responsible is the federal government. The Liberals love it when the issue is clouded by several levels of government being involved in taxing and distributing this income.
My friend has pointed out that it is the same thing with health care, where we have different levels of government involved. The Liberals love not having that direct line of accountability between collecting revenues and distributing the services because it allows them to get away with all kinds of actions. They then take credit when it suits them.
We all know that they will put up a sign on a highway saying that a road is funded by the federal government. When it suits them, the signs are up, but on the other hand, 99% of the roads that are built in this country are not built by money that comes from the federal government. So when it does not suit them they are out of it. They do not want to spend that money if they are not going to get a big political bang for it.
It is time to have a little accountability here. Some of that money that goes into excise taxes must start to come back to municipalities and the provinces.
In this case, we would step out of that tax room, vacate it and allow the provinces to take it over, contingent upon an agreement with their municipalities to ensure the money gets back to the municipalities so they can use it for roads and infrastructure as it was intended.
In conclusion, I hope that Liberal members across the way will swallow themselves whole and vote in favour of this motion today even though they voted, to a person, against it last spring. We look forward to seeing how they will vote on this issue.