Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments and questions posed by my hon. colleague from the New Democratic Party. He raises quite a myriad of questions, although I am not sure that I got them all.
I will take the last one first, the fact that the money could fluctuate quite a bit. Of course governments at all levels must deal with this all the time and I suspect that while it does pose some problems in the sense of ongoing stable funding, government at any level would have to deal with the fact. On any given year the money might fluctuate somewhat.
I think my hon. colleague would agree that the key point here is getting the federal government to recognize for the first time that when a tax is collected on gasoline or fuel, in some cases diesel fuel for trucks and locomotives, there should be a commitment that money is actually spent on infrastructure. That is what we are not seeing.
All the questions that he is raising are quite valid. If this motion were to pass, those are things that could be worked out. This would not be unique in the sense that we already have a number of agreements between the provincial and federal levels of government, indeed tripartite agreements in many cases with municipalities as well.
They are not insurmountable. There should be an agreement on a commitment by the municipalities and the provinces to actually target that tax room to infrastructure, and be held accountable for that spending so that we do not end up in a similar situation that we have at the federal level where that money comes in at less than 2%. Even when the Canada infrastructure program is added in, that the government keeps bragging about, it is still only about 10% of the money that is collected.
What we are dealing with here is, first and foremost, accountability and a recognition by the federal government that it has a responsibility, when it collects these billions of dollars in fuel taxes, to spend them in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure from coast to coast.