Madam Speaker, my colleague from York West was here for the latter part of my talk at which time I raised some points that I had in a letter. Perhaps she can respond to that.
The singular biggest criticism that I have of this bill and, in fact, the blueprint itself was that it was tabled a week after the federal budget. A responsible, more effective approach by the transport minister, if he was really interested in doing something about transport--as there is going to be a really big push in mid-term between two election campaigns--was to have tabled his blueprint earlier. We know it was ready. He could have tabled the blueprint three months ago and then travelled around the country, talked to stakeholders, mayors, MPs, MLAs, and talked to everyone he could talk to. He could have talked to all the stakeholders across Canada and gathered support for some specific initiatives in that blueprint, then he could have taken it to cabinet and won some fights in the federal budget in order to obtain money for some specific proposals.
That is the way one moves the transportation ball forward. Instead, he delivered it a week after the budget when, even if he won some policy fights, it was only going to be regulatory stuff and there was not going to be any money, particularly when one thinks about things like the air tax, the gas tax, financing highways and ports, and so on. I think it is a failure on the part of the Minister of Transport that he did not table this before the budget to gather support and obtain a commitment in the budget for some of the ideas in the blueprint because as it stands now there is nothing in the blueprint that is going to get done.
I ask the parliamentary secretary to perhaps defend the approach of doing this because it seems to me, and to virtually every stakeholder I have seen, to be a completely ineffective way of getting the transportation interests of this country moved forward.