Mr. Speaker, I am very aware of the hon. member's commitment and interest in municipal infrastructure. He has been a strong advocate for the national, provincial and municipal governments working together.
In the 1993 election platform of the Liberal Party, Canada's infrastructure investments, the Canada strategic infrastructure fund and the municipal rural infrastructure fund, all of those programs were in the face of the huge deficit inherited from the previous Conservative government. There is no question it was a challenge. I want to assure the hon. member that Quebec was the very first province in Canada to recognize and sign on to the Chrétien Liberal government's Canada infrastructure program.
While I accept that there are challenges with balancing all of the moneys that we have as a Parliament of Canada to allocate to various projects, infrastructure is in a crisis. I agree with the hon. member that the gas tax and GST rebates are part of a larger problem. I would encourage the hon. member to continue to oppose the Conservative government's neo-con approach that looks at municipalities but does not have money for them. It does not have money for the mayors, councillors and communities. The Minister of Finance said they should stop their whining and do their jobs. The Minister of Human Resources and Social Development said we should be cutting infrastructure programs. The Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities said it was a large amount of money when in fact if we go through the numbers and look at the 2005 commitment made by the previous government, we find that there was in fact an investment of $11.5 billion for municipal infrastructure which got cut by $7.5 billion by the current government.