Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and speak about the Speech from the Throne.
I want to put some context into why we are doing this. My colleague noted that we had a situation where the government released a Speech from the Throne thinking that it would be a way of building Canada or a way of moving us forward. We know all sides of the House would expect that we could have a good debate about the ideas and about the things that we would see in the upcoming year. What has happened is that a series of other events have overtaken that and put a cloud over the government.
What I did in terms of preparing for today was to think about the last year in terms of the last Speech from the Throne which was called “The Canada We Want”. In it the government set forward a series of action items that it considered a priority at that time such as Kyoto. The government mentioned smart borders in terms of our relationship with the United States and abroad, and a number of other initiatives related to municipalities and funding.
Today the government is the same. We have not had an election. We should be looking at what has happened over the last year to see the advancement of our country, not only in terms of ourselves in our communities but as a nation abroad. It is very disappointing. That is what we need to do when we are reflecting upon this government and its Speech from the Throne that has very vague platitudes about actions that later on translate into decisions at budget time.
The government's action on Kyoto over the last year has been abysmal. Canadians have seen nothing. There has been nothing for consumers who want to purchase environmentally friendly products and services, nothing in terms of businesses that are repeatedly coming to members of Parliament from all sides saying that they have good ideas and they want to invest in a better and brighter Canada, but do not have the ability to do so.
This is important to note because this Speech from the Throne abandons that.
The throne speech talked a little bit about municipalities in terms of the GST. If we go back a year, the previous Speech from the Throne set aside money for an infrastructure fund. Grand plans were talked about for an infrastructure fund. The government was patting itself on the back about how much it would make a difference for municipalities.
I simply ask Canadians, have they seen any federal money in their ridings, their neighbourhoods, on their streets that have actually improved their infrastructure? It has not happened. Quite literally, when we broke down the numbers, it equated to approximately $50,000 per municipality in terms of infrastructure funds. It is outrageous. We are talking about a sidewalk that we might be able to install in a community or repair a small part of a road, or fill some potholes. It was $50,000 per municipality. This is not acceptable.
We now come to this Speech from the Throne and we get the GST for municipalities, that they should not have been paying for in the first place. They already had a partial rebate on the GST. Therefore, it is not a full 7% that the municipalities would get back.
I know municipalities across Ontario and in other parts of the country are going through their budget deliberations right now. That money that they are getting from the GST will not be enough to counterbalance the downloading that has happened from the federal government and other levels of government. It is an insidious way of trying to say that the government is doing something by not taking something from the municipalities and then making them say they should be thankful for that.
It is difficult in terms of accepting this Speech from the Throne's discussion points on the actual sharing of the gas tax. It is quite simple for the government. If it wants to participate in building this country instead of providing money to tax cuts or shelters or having environmental fines be tax deductible, it could use those resources and direct them straight to municipalities as the previous throne speech did.
The federal government does not have to negotiate with provincial and municipal governments because it knows the result. The result will be bogged down endlessly and Canadians will not see improvements on their streets.
That is what people should be thinking about for the next year, going into the next election: infrastructure projects. How many construction signs are up? How many bidding contracts go out for municipalities? How many more waste water treatment plants are upgraded or improved? We should compare that to the platitudes that are espoused in this document.
It is important to note another issue in regard to the Speech from the Throne. Despite the fact that there has been a literal cry for help from municipalities, from business people and from auto workers for a Canadian national auto policy, we have not even seen a single statement on that. This is critical, because we have witnessed over this last year a series of very difficult situations for the auto industry and we still have nothing. Not only that, the government is not even discussing with the United States what it is going to do in terms of challenging the fact that the U.S. governments are actually stealing Canadian jobs by funding plants. Of the last 18 plants that have been created in North America, only one has come to Canada because there has been massive government subsidization on the U.S. side from a trade agreement that our government agreed to, yet does not challenge--and there is a dispute panel available for that at NAFTA--nor does the government say that at least we are going to create a national auto policy. That is dangerous.
The fact of the matter is that we have 98 Liberals in Ontario, with the auto industry one in six, and they could not get a single notation of the auto industry at a critical time in this nation's history. We are seeing some great technological evolution in the automobile. The key for the future of the automobile is going to be what comes out of the tailpipe for our environmental concerns, but more important for our consumers and our citizens at the end of the day is to have jobs producing these new vehicles, and quite frankly that simply is not happening.
We have these new technologies that will be rolled out, and what will happen is that the United States basically will be stealing or providing subsidies to make sure that they get them. That is what happened recently with DaimlerChrysler and its new hybrid engine that is going to Michigan. It got massive subsidies and now it has a brand new plant manufacturing a hybrid engine, which we do not have in our community or here in Canada.
I also want to talk about a specific issue, because it is important that people can at least associate some of the issues of the Speech from the Throne with their own communities. In Windsor, Ontario, we have been struggling to get the government to act on government funds committed by the former prime minister for border infrastructure improvements, with the province of Ontario, funds of $300 million. More than one year later we have not seen a single penny, despite the fact that the community literally has cried for help.
On top of that, and this is actually a scandal of national proportions, we have a municipality here that is being offered $300 million, or could be eligible if there were actually a plan for which they could apply, for infrastructure funds, but the plan has been so corrupt and so flawed that they have actually hired an environmental lawyer to the tune of $1.5 million in a war chest to fight the government's plan.
In fact, another municipality, the town of LaSalle, has done the same thing. They have hired an environmental lawyer to fight this government. How incredible is that, when we have a lower level of government, a municipality, having to reach out to the taxpayers to fight the senior level of government's implementation of their own dollars? It is absolutely obscene. It is scandalous. It has to change.
We have simple items of consensus. I want to boil this down so people across Canada understand this. One of the roadways we have to cross is called Huron Church Road. There are approximately 10 lanes, with approximately 40,000 vehicles, many of them tens of thousands of trucks, that travel this corridor per day. We have schools, churches, business and homes there. In getting to one of the schools, Assumption College, a very historic one in Canada, people cannot get across the actual streets safely. We have had tragedy after tragedy.
Despite that, we cannot get a pedestrian crosswalk. The absolute cost of this, the total, is $1.5 million. We cannot get it. The Prime Minister's company can get $10 million in government grants, but we cannot get $1.5 million to get students safely to school. Tragically, last month a mother was killed taking her children to school. How many more deaths have to happen before the government actually translates some of these things that are in the throne speech to real things that change Canadians' lives? The government is accountable.