Mr. Speaker, I listened to the member for Kitchener Centre talk about the infrastructure program that was introduced by the Liberal government in 1994. I know there are a lot of Liberals applauding across the country because they are the ones who seem to benefit the most from it.
In fact it was very interesting. The member talked about how good the infrastructure program is. Most people think of infrastructure as being things like roads, streets, airports, water and sewers, but there seem to be a lot of bocce courts that were funded under the Liberal government. In fact the fairness aspect seemed to be sorely lacking. I recall that the member from Winnipeg, Lloyd Axworthy who was a minister at the time, seemed to get about three times as much money in his riding as I did in my riding of Peace River, and there was no shortage of applications.
Would it not be better to move to a system that did away with the political interference with infrastructure programs that are paid out on a political basis? Would it not be better to give some structure to the municipalities so that they could count on a constant source of revenue such as the gas tax coming from the provinces and given up by the federal government? Would that not be a far better program to implement rather than the politically based infrastructure program we have seen in the past?