Mr. Speaker, I have had the pleasure of working with the member for Trinity--Spadina on these issues over many years. I believe she has asked me a nine part question. I will endeavour to do my best to provide an answer in the time allotted to me.
The province of Ontario suffered greatly through the Conservative era and it has only been in the past few years that the new provincial government is trying to undo that. As well, the federal commitment to infrastructure for communities was the first attempt by any national government to take a very active and pecuniary support role in addressing municipal revenue shortcomings in a direct way.
In the past year, I believe for the first time in history, the province of Ontario actually came to an agreement with the federal government on a national highway program. That was also very significant because the previous government would not do that.
With that in mind, we know that organizations such as the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario are very concerned about the ending of these infrastructure funds. In my presentation today, I tried very clearly to show that infrastructure funding must continue to communities in general, but that any supportive funding for border security, accessibility, tunnels, bridges, and all these kinds of things must be an independent and freshly directed source of funding so that it does not dilute the other funding that is available to communities.
When we talk about this commitment, currently the municipal leaders all across the country are in great fear of tomorrow's budget. They do not want to start all over again in trying to convince a national government of the need to support municipal or community infrastructure. The member's question was very well put in that way and I know she understands the issue very well. Throughout my riding and throughout many people's ridings, indeed throughout all parties, people are quite concerned about tomorrow's budget, that it may undo many years of good work by intelligent municipal leadership across the country.