Mr. Speaker, it is just a matter of simple math. When the Liberal government came into power, we had to dig ourselves out from under a $42 million deficit left to us by the Conservative government. We then had to balance those budgets.
In spite of that, we saw the dire situation in many municipalities and we started, even then, at the very beginning of our term as a new government, a tripartite funding system for basic infrastructure.
The problem is that we were just keeping everyone's head above water. When we started to get money, we sat down and talked about the permanence of things. We then put in the gas tax and did the GST rebates. We realized that it was like running to catch up. Cities have so much debt load and they have so much infrastructure to catch up with that it is not reasonable for a federal government to give the money, as the member said, $33 billion over seven years, and then tie strings to them and also introduce programs that are purely federal in nature and not really going to the cities at all.
The national highways program is not a cities program nor is it a municipalities program. This is where the sort of smoke and mirrors come in, and that is what I was being critical of.