Debates of Dec. 6th, 2007

Opposition Motion--Federal Excise Tax on Gasoline

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I gave my hon. colleague from Alberta one example of a very poor system, the P3 system. I would like to give him another one called the Joe Howe Building in Halifax. This will not sound true, but it did happen.

Years ago the provincial government under the Conservatives had a building that it owned and it sold it to a real estate company. It leased it from the company for a period of time. When the lease expired, the provincial government was going to leave, but the realtor who owned the building said that if the government left, he would get into serious trouble because of his finances.

The provincial government was going to leave. The assessment on the building dropped. The realtor was going to lose a lot of money. He sold it to another real estate firm. That other real estate firm convinced the then government that it should stick around.

Usually when I rent a place, I pay the rent, but the taxes and all the other things are paid for by the landlord. That is part of what I pay. However, the then provincial government, which was going to leave the building, stuck around and signed a 25 year lease with the new owners of the building it was going to leave.

It did not just pay for the rental of the building. It paid for all the heat, all the maintenance, all the taxes, all the insurance, everything. The provincial Conservative government signed on to all the costs associated with the building.

At the end of the day, the building still does not belong to the taxpayer, and the cost of renting and leasing those things out was phenomenal. It is a huge scandal in Nova Scotia. Conservatives did that. They did it with the schools and now with this program. Then we have our sanitation, which is picked up by a private contractor who has to make a certain profit at the end of the year, which costs the taxpayer even more money.

Those are just three examples that I have given this fine gentleman of the P3 system. What guarantees will he put in place of any P3 system that, first of all, before it goes to that, there will be wide public consultation before that happens? What assurances can he give the House, to the people of Nova Scotia and others, that if the federal government does this--

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I can assure the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore that is the reason we have not jumped into this and just thrown money to the four winds. We are actually going to be accountable and responsive to taxpayers. We are going to make sure it is done right.

I own several commercial buildings in northern Alberta and I rent them out, none to the government, I promise. I can promise that we do not do business like that, because it is a family business. Government should be run like a family business, and our family in this business is every taxpayer in Canada, every Canadian citizen, every person who lives in Canada. We should treat them all with respect. We should be accountable to them. We should be honest with them. We should make sure that they can plan long term for the future to make sure that their needs and their quality of life stays at a certain level.

I cannot be held accountable for what happened in Nova Scotia or other places. I can give my colleague examples and we can debate those examples and debate issues, but the reality is that P3s do work if they are done properly. We are going to make sure they are done properly.

[Derek Lee, Liberal, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question for the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

Does he and his party intend to support the Liberal motion that is being debated here this afternoon? This motion would make more permanent the movement of gasoline excise tax in eight of our municipalities for infrastructure. Does his party intend to support that? I hope it will.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

That was an excellent question, Mr. Speaker. I am going to have to ask the member to be patient. Christmas is right around the corner and he will find out very soon as to whether or not we support it.

I would like to ask him a question. Does he support the former intergovernmental affairs minister, his current leader, who told mayors from across Canada, “You know full well that the Constitution clearly establishes that municipal affairs fall under provincial jurisdiction, and that the provinces are determined to keep it that way”.

Does he also support the Liberal MP for Pickering—Scarborough East who said:

It's hard to make the argument that Toronto has great needs when it's doing so extraordinarily well economically. It's a hard argument to make in the weaker regions of the country.

Is he actually going to leave Toronto and the rest of the municipalities in Canada out in the cold if they get back into government, like some of the members of his party would do? Is that their hidden agenda?

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, I would like very briefly to speak of P3s because the NDP member just spoke of them.

I had a P3 in my constituency. It was a $140 million highway project in the Kicking Horse Canyon. It obviously was a gigantic project. That highway project came in completely on budget and amazingly came in 19 months early. Cars and trucks are safely travelling that section of the Trans-Canada Highway as a direct result of the arrangements that were made under a P3 program.

P3 is not a panacea; it does not answer all of the questions. It can be used as leverage where there are specific projects so that we can get as much as 15 or 20 years ahead on projects with the amount of capital that we presently have.

I wonder if the parliamentary secretary would like to comment on that.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

I would like to comment on that, Mr. Speaker. I have been to that particular area. I was aware of that. I used it as an example earlier, along with the Edmonton ring road that came in under budget and well in advance of the deadline.

I think P3s are one of many tools that we must use in order to recover from the $123 billion deficit that the former Liberal government left us with. We have to use as many tools as we can. We need to make sure that we are accountable to taxpayers and that we are honest with them. We need to get that quality of life where it should be. This government and this Prime Minister are committed to do that, and we are going to do it.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe.

This is a fairly simple motion. It makes common sense. It talks about making permanent a fund that will go toward cities so that they can do all of the things that they need to do.

In the old days, cities fixed the roads, looked after the lights and those kinds of things. In the 21st century, they are responsible for so many things. Cities are now the places where immigrants come to live. Cities are responsible for physical infrastructure. They are responsible for social infrastructure. They are responsible for public health issues. They are responsible for arts and culture. They are responsible for tourism. They are responsible for sport. They are responsible for crime prevention and enforcement.

Today, municipalities and cities carry the burden which, in the old days, provincial governments and federal governments carried. That is a good thing for cities to be able to do, not to carry the burden but to do those things, mainly because they are the level of government that is closest to the people. It is the level of government that understands the local ways of delivering things that will actually be effective and efficient.

It is one thing for Ottawa to say, “We think you should do things this way”, when locally in a particular rural municipality or in a particular urban municipality, they know it will not work that way. What works in Toronto I know never works in Vancouver, and what works in Vancouver does not work in Winnipeg.

It is common sense for cities to have to do this. However, because cities have taken on this major burden, we as a federal government need to play a role in helping them to shoulder that burden.

Some people have said that cities have a deficit of $60 billion. I think the recent studies by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities said it is $100 billion. This is increasing at the rate of $2 billion a year. We can do the math. In the past, federal governments had programs, a little program for this and a little program for that, and we put a few million dollars into this and a few million dollars into that. Each year cities did not know whether those programs were going to be continued, whether they were going to be there for three years, five years or whatever.

It is time to treat cities and municipalities with respect, to treat them as an equal level of government. This is what the Liberals began to do in 2005 when we started to talk about a new deal for cities. We started to talk about communities. A sign of that respect was the creation of a minister responsible at the cabinet table for dealing with municipalities. We realized that we should not be handing down charitable things to the municipalities. We need to work with them.

Partnership is important. The word “partnership” actually indicates respect. It indicates equality. It indicates sitting at a table and asking what we need to do to make a difference, not merely giving a handout and attaching 2,000 strings to it, saying cities can only use it for this or that. We began this move forward in 2005.

I heard many speakers on the government side say that they have given the gas tax to cities. Actually, that is not quite true. This is something a Liberal government did. We transferred the gas tax. They also talked about how they gave a GST rebate. Actually, the Liberal government did that. If we look at it, we are talking about $11.8 billion in gas tax and we are talking about $5.8 billion in the GST rebate.

What we are saying is it is not good enough for that to be a one-shot deal, to give it this year but maybe not next year. We are talking about sustainability and permanence, the ability for cities to plan.

As members well know, cities do not have a lot of ways to get money. They do not have huge tax bases. They tax housing and property and that is about it, yet they have all of this need for money to spend. They are not allowed to go into a deficit, so they borrow. Cities every year put these balanced budgets forward and in the meantime they are racking up their debts. Cities are deep in debt as well. Therefore, we need to think about this because for every dollar taxpayers pay, it is the same taxpayer paying the dollars to three levels of government.

It is time we did things differently. It is time we sat down and respected each other and came up with integrated, comprehensive ways of doing things. It does not mean we say to cities or communities that this is what has to be done and then hand them money and let them wait year after year. It is time to set permanent structures to do this.

There has been a lot of talk across the way by the government members that they did this and they did that. I have given a nice compliment that the government accepted the Liberal gas tax and the Liberal GST rebate. The government has said it will make that permanent. At the same time, the government has put new money in. I heard an hon. member say that this new money is money the federal government should have been spending anyway. When it talks about national highways, that is not a municipal agenda, that is a national agenda. The federal government should not be counting that as something it handed over to the cities. We are talking about gateways. Again, these are national programs. Those should not be included in the money the government gives to cities to pay for the things that cities need to build.

Cities are now responsible for housing. We can go into the big cities of this country and the situation is bad. There is homelessness everywhere. There is drug addiction. There are urban aboriginal people on the streets in the west who live a dire existence in absolute poverty. They are depending on the city to provide for them, when of course the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to provide for them. The aboriginal people move into cities and there are problems. We have to focus on funding cities in a stable manner, so that the cities can deal with some of these challenges and problems.

We talk about simple things such as health care and water. Everyone talks about clean water as if it is some sort of wonderful thing that suddenly it was decided that Canadians must have to drink. This is not new. This is a basic, fundamental human right.

Many of us remember the Harris government in Ontario. We know that the present federal Minister of Finance was the minister of finance in that government. This is the kind of attitude that government had in those days. We remember Walkerton. We see how Toronto, a great city of Canada, is now literally on its knees. The city is trying to fix things, trying to provide housing and infrastructure. There are transit problems. The cities are getting bigger and bigger and the problems will get worse.

When we talk about infrastructure, it is not simply roads and bridges. We are talking about all the social infrastructure. I recall that the Liberal government during the last election talked about how big cities needed law enforcement. We have to take some kind of responsibility for dealing with crime, guns, the kinds of things that have been going on in our cities. The previous Liberal government said that it would help to provide police in our cities. I remember when the Conservative government made a promise about police. The first thing that the government said in its last budget was, “Don't look at us. We gave money to the provinces. Let them hand it over to the cities. Let them look after the cities”. It is that kind of arrogant attitude that says, “Let them eat cake, and if the cities have a problem, let them go to the provinces on their knees and beg for crumbs”. All of this is happening when the provinces themselves are having to deal with some of the major issues.

All of this is smoke and mirrors when the government says that it gave $33 billion over a period of time. We know that many of those are purely federal initiatives, things that the federal government should be doing anyway.

Today's motion talks about giving cities, communities and municipalities the opportunity to build, the opportunity to grow and the opportunity to provide people with all the things that we talked about that they need to provide.

We talked about the fact that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities came to the federal government with a plan. The municipalities have long term plans. These are accountable people. We can tie in accountability and in other words make sure that the money is spent on certain things, but not attach the kind of strings that the government is attaching. The federal government says that they cannot do certain things with the money. They cannot spend it on housing. They must only spend it on the things that the federal government thinks they should spend it on. This is so degrading to duly elected municipal representatives who have to deliver to their people.

I know the Conservatives do not like to do anything the Liberals suggest. They seem to think that we do not do things right, but history has shown that we have done things right. The municipalities were very pleased with our new deal for cities. I am suggesting that for once the Conservatives park their bias at the door and give permanent funding through the gas tax to cities. Then the cities will be able to plan and build and will be able to sustain the quality of life for the people who live in those municipalities.

[Keith Martin, Liberal, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we know in British Columbia, as in the rest of the country, we have serious infrastructure problems. Would it make a lot of sense for the government to double the excise tax revenues that we introduced to go to the municipalities and also ensure that the municipalities have three year base funding?

One of the problems that the municipalities have is that they have no idea of what they are getting from one year to the next. As a result, they cannot intelligently plan out for the programs that their communities need.

I have a private member's motion to do just this. Would it not make more sense for the government to double the excise taxes going to the municipalities and ensure they have three year stable base funding so they could plan out for future infrastructure needs for their communities?

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has been very active in this area. He is a very passionate member of Parliament and his idea of three year funding is a good one.

However, I would like to look at us giving the cities the infrastructure funding and the other money they need in terms of the gas tax for an indefinite period of time or at least until they are able to dig themselves out from all the debt that they are buried under. Until they are able to have a clear way of changing the way cities are right now, changing their infrastructure and developing and building on it. Then we can go back to the table and discuss how to deal with this on a three year basis.

I really think that right now three years is not enough. I think there needs to be a longer period of time for cities to move away from the problems they are facing.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed listening to the member's speech. I appreciated her mentioning that our government has actually introduced some new money for municipalities. At least she is fair about that.

However, she was fairly critical of our government and claimed that we were doing very little for municipalities, when in fact our $33 billion infrastructure program over some seven years is perhaps the largest investment, if not in Canadian history, certainly in the last 50 years, and we need to acknowledge that.

The member has all kinds of proposals and suggestions and, of course, the Liberal plan for municipalities. The member and her government, the previous Liberal government, had 13 years in which to implement that plan. Somehow it never got done and I am asking her why.

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

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.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, would the Liberal Party not agree that because of the fact that there are such cutbacks in the municipal-provincial transfers from the federal government in terms of infrastructure, that companies are coming out of the woodwork saying that they will look after our water systems, our sewage systems and our sanitation systems but that there will be a major fee?

In the case of Halifax, for example, and in other countries like England and France where water systems are now going to the private sector, we are finding that a lot of people cannot afford water services and are being cut off from basic water rights.The cost to the taxpayer in the end, in those examples, is much more than if the water systems had stayed under a public regime. Would the member not agree with that?

[Hedy Fry, Liberal, Vancouver Centre, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member makes some common sense there.

Of course we need to tie in accountability to the money but I think the days when we used to give cities money and told them what exactly to do with it and what not to do with it, tied the hands of the cities. It did not deal with them with respect.

Some cities or municipalities may believe that the best way to provide certain services is to come together with other small municipalities around the area and maybe contract it out privately or do it publicly. I am not prepared to tell municipalities how to do that. I am prepared to see that access is there for everyone and that is the issue.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

Before resuming debate, it is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Mount Royal, Justice; the hon. member for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley, Maher Arar.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about communities and municipalities.

In New Brunswick, where I am from, we have big cities, small cities and communities that are not organized, also known as local service districts.

I would like to craft my comments knowing what I do know from New Brunswick and the Maritime provinces but also having served on the Federation of Canadian Municipalities finance committee and having been the president of the Cities of New Brunswick Association, to bring to the discussion, which I think we need to have in this Parliament, about this order of government called municipalities in Canada and what has happened to them recently and in the recent past.

In a question earlier from the parliamentary secretary, although it is odd that he would ask an opposition member for advice, but knowing that he asked the member for Scarborough—Rouge River for advice was probably a good decision because of his sage advice often given in this House over his many years here.

However, it is interesting because that member represents the greater Toronto area and we often look at cities as if it were just Toronto, but it is not. There are 10 major cities in Canada that comprise some 75% of the GDP in this country, but there are other communities. There are hub cities and metropolitan areas. The census now recognizes places like Moncton as a census metropolitan area. We have to remember that cities, towns and villages are organized areas that can all profit from the motion that is before this House with respect to the sharing of gas tax revenue.

There are orders of government in this country. During the debates that predate Confederation and the reports that Confederation was based on, and one in particular is Lord Durham's report, there was much discussion of making municipalities a formal order of government, a government with its own constitutional sphere of powers. That never came to be.

If I may be permitted, municipal scholars have looked at the Confederation debates and there was some talk of making municipalities in that sphere. It never happened but a lot of things were discussed at the Confederation debates that never made it into the Constitution Act, or the BNA as it was then in 1867.

However, it is important to underline that communities existed at the time Canada was formed and they became an order of government, on paper, subservient to provincial governments.

The question about whether municipalities' acts in the various provinces are enacted and create and regulate municipalities may seem like a moot one. This is clearly a division between federal and provincial jurisdiction.

However, not so fast, I would say, because over the course of history the federal government and the provincial government, those two levels or orders of government, have either let municipalities continue with their powers in their own sphere, uninterrupted, not invading that territory, so that by right municipalities have constitutional status, by default as it were, but more recently, there have been involvements by federal and provincial governments in allowing municipalities certain powers or agencies of government certain powers being devolved to municipalities, which make our cities, towns and villages a true order of government which, I may say, without doubt, as an experienced veteran in the field of municipal affairs, were treated much better under the past Liberal government than they are being treated today.

If we want to just cut the debate short, all questions could be answered by asking this one question: What do municipalities, cities, towns and villages across this country think of the Conservative infrastructure program?

Are the cities in Canada that do not have borders and do not have bridges happy that over half the money that is called infrastructure is going to borders and bridges? I do not think so. Are they happy that this government will not have the guts to say that after one more year it will cut out the gas tax transfer?

The government is just putting this in its aspire budget so that it can skate passed the next election and then get really to the point about cities. It does not respect cities. It does not respect them as orders of government. It is going to take away that hard-earned money from our communities and leave them pretty bereft. It is quite certain.

Let us put this in contradistinction to what the Liberal government did. When I was a city mayor, a lot of lobbying and work was done on behalf of the Liberal government by people like the member for York West who authored a report, which was accepted by the government in 2001, and the member for Don Valley West who became a secondary minister responsible for municipalities and infrastructure.

After a lot of work, progress was being made. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities was a little happier and our cities could see forward a few years. They could keep the lights on along the roads. They could keep shovelling the snow off their highways. They could ensure that they could grow and become the economic generator they are for Canada today.

Is it lost on the government ? In listening to the debate, is it lost on the House that cities and municipalities are growing? Sadly, our country is becoming less of an urban nation, as it was at the time of Confederation, than it is now. That is part of the character of Canada that is being lost, but it is very much in sync with what is happening in the rest of the world. It is a fact that cannot be ignored. If we look at progressive legislation over the years, recognizing facts that happen is a lot better than reacting to something that is evident after a disaster happens. I will provide two examples.

In the 1970s the Liberal government instituted its first minister of state for urban affairs. This was followed, as I mentioned, with the appointment of the member for Don Valley West. There is a continuum under Liberal governments of respecting municipalities.

What happens under Conservative regimes is a downloading of authority without an uploading of financial resources. I can give one example that will ring true to everyone who knows anything about disasters, human health and governance for our citizens, and that is Walkerton.

Before Walkerton, municipal infrastructure programs, and I do not care which government I spatter with this, were very much at the whim of the political desires of the local representatives, affecting very important strategic infrastructure like water treatment plants. What is more important than delivering clean drinking water to our communities and citizens? Very little except national health care, maybe.

After Walkerton it was very much realized that the infrastructure programs had to take care, through its strategic initiatives, to ensure the money was well spent. That is why there has been a return to the days. The Conservative Party in power now wants to take infrastructure money, put it into friendly communities, that is, Conservative communities, and spend the money for pork barrel politics. That is what is happening here.

Let us also remind ourselves that it was a Conservative regime that created the Walkerton mess in the first place. One does not have to look far afield from this place to realize that people like the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and the Minister of the Environment were involved in a government that devolved authority to municipalities, which did not have the resources to follow through with their very heavy responsibilities.

It is a sad tale in Walkerton. The fellow who was in charge of putting chlorine in the water purification system also had duties cleaning rinks at night. This is because the Harris government decided that it had better cut money to the municipalities. Does it not ring true in a continual chain when we hear the Minister of Finance so ungraciously and unimaginably insult cities and their mayors? He did it publicly and openly. He had a chance to retract it and he did not. It is the way he feels. It is the way the government feels.

The young member for the riding of Nepean—Carleton was on an Ottawa talk show and completely insulted mayors, as if mayors were aliens that came out of nowhere, asking for money that did not belong to them as representatives of citizens. In many ways, municipalities respect the rule that the voter or citizen, the person they deal with and see every day, wants his or her garbage picked up and snow removed.

Those are the people who the Minister of Finance and the member for Nepean—Carleton have no respect for and that is why the government has no guts and will not support a motion that extends the transfer of gas tax revenue. I can see no other reason except it has an agenda of getting a majority government, spending money in the communities it likes for big boondoggle projects, doing nothing about extending gas tax revenues to municipalities and letting them wither on the vine.

It is shameful. This motion is positive. It follows an historic chain of recognizing and supporting municipalities. I urge all members of the House to support it.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's comments were insightful and interesting, notwithstanding that they seemed a bit illogical and not based on fact.

I understand he had to look back to the seventies to find something historically that he could brag about for the Liberals in relation to the secretary of urban affairs. However, some members in the House were not even born at that time. I will look to more recent times.

The member talked about human health and clean drinking water. First, would he comment on Environment Canada's move some time ago when he was the mayor of his city? I understand it was the first city ever that was fined by Environment Canada for polluting in Petitcodiac.

Also would he comment on why it took the member from Port Moody—Westwood—Port Coquitlam, who had two motions in 2003, to call upon the then Liberal government to help cities and municipalities, and it never got the job done? It took this government and the Prime Minister to do something for municipalities.

Finally, why did the Liberals do nothing for 13 years to clean up Saint John Harbour? It took this government to allocate $26.6 million to finally get the job done.

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, there was a lot there. I am glad that the parliamentary secretary gave me an opportunity to talk about the Petitcodiac River, a major environmental cleanup project on which his government completely closed the door after a federally sanctioned EIA project. A federally funded project was entered into and the previous federal government and the current provincial government said that they would abide by the findings.

In the 1990s a landfill closure took place, which was sanctioned by both levels of government. Environment Canada found that there was pollution getting into the river. Through a court settlement, it was agreed that the city of Moncton, for the first time, would contribute economically to the restoration of the Petitcodiac River. For the first time, a city of Moncton council said that river restoration was a very important thing.

I am very proud, having been the mayor of that municipality, to own up to responsibilities. I only wish the Conservative government would own up to its responsibilities and say that the Petitcodiac River restoration is just as important as the Saint John Harbour cleanup, as many of the other projects in Conservative ridings that get environmental funds.

When the parliamentary secretary talked about 2003 and the member for Port Moody—Westwood—Port Coquitlam, I was a mayor in 1998 and on when the Liberal government came down, after much barking from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not some backbench Alliance-Reform-Conservative Party, or whatever they were then, MP. It was the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, of which I was part, that got a government going on the best infrastructure program for municipalities in the western hemisphere. It is a Liberal invention that the member should not destroy.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague from Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe. He was the mayor of his municipality, and I was a city councillor for six years back in Edmundston. Being part of a city council really means providing basic services to people.

I remember some of the debates we had when I started out in 1998. My term as city councillor ended in 2004. I remember that early on in the debates, people talked about how hard we had to work. The Liberal government proposed some solutions. I was proud to be part of the Liberal government the day it announced that it would give a portion of the gas tax back to municipalities.

What we really want to do is make this a permanent program. The Conservatives do not seem to want to do that.

Can my colleague explain the repercussions on our cities, towns and LSDs—God knows there are lots of LSDs in my riding—if the Conservatives reject our motion and simply drop the gas tax?

[Brian Murphy, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, in New Brunswick it was quite well done. The cities, the incorporated areas, got half the money and the unincorporated areas and the small villages got the other half of the money.

If this gas tax division of revenue in the province of New Brunswick does not take place, it means villages like Saint-Quentin, the towns of St. Basile, now part of Edmunston, and the other smaller villages, Kedgwick and other places in his riding will not have enough money through the gas tax sharing of revenue to maybe pave or renew their streets and roads that their tourists go through. They will not have any money to do any economic development, restoring things like the great Restigouche River salmon fishery.

They will not have the money to see infrastructure projects like winter skiing, Palais des congrès, all these things that take place in the vital area of the Breyonne, which he represents, Madawaska, take place because there will be no long term funding formula for those poor municipalities.

I appreciate he is doing all he can—

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

Order, please. Resuming debate, the hon. member for Victoria.

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore.

First, the NDP will be supporting this motion.

As a former city councillor in Victoria, I have seen the financial squeeze experienced by my city as a result of downloading and increased responsibility over the years. It meant reduced transit service, despite increasing demand. It meant storm water systems could not be fixed. Libraries, already too small and inadequate for the need, could not be expanded. On and on it goes.

We know what infrastructure means for a city. We know how crucial it is for quality of life. Infrastructure involves our transportation system. It involves our water system in distribution, supply, and treatment. We are all aware of the problems in many parts of Canada with the basic water supply. It involves waste water treatment, sanitary and storm sewers and related treatment facilities. It relates to transit facilities, equipment and rolling stock. It also involves many other public facilities like cultural and social centres, sports facilities and waste management facilities.

We are not talking about just any kind of infrastructure. As a result of the crisis of climate change, we should be thinking about green infrastructure to allow our cities to reduce their carbon footprints. This makes the investment in infrastructure by the federal government even more critical at this time. It cannot be business as usual as the Conservative government is proposing.

The recent FCM report talks about the near collapse of our infrastructure. Mr. Steeves, the president of FCM, said, “both the size of the deficit and its accelerating growth point to a coming collapse in Canada’s municipal infrastructure”. We know the impact this will have on our communities.

This deficit has been a long time coming. The federal budgetary cuts in the mid-nineties were part of the problem. As a result, municipalities had no choice. It was a question of fixing the storm sewers or fixing something else. The competing demands could not be met.

In 1992 the infrastructure deficit was $20 billion. By 2006, that deficit had grown to $60 billion. Now we are told by the FCM report that it has grown to $128 billion and will continue to accelerate because the infrastructure has grown older and has not been replaced. This will affect Canadians in their daily lives in many ways and very seriously.

Right now municipalities have difficulty managing current infrastructure demands let alone the accumulated backlog that has resulted from many years of Liberal under-investment and neglect. This is being compounded by population growth and migration to cities.

The Conservatives promised in the 2006 election to, “fully implement the transfer of the equivalent of five cents per litre of gasoline to cities and communities”. That will not happen until 2009-10. The full $2 billion of gas tax transfers will not be implemented, again, until 2010. Given the problems that we have been made aware of through the FCM report, this is just unconscionable.

I would like to talk about how this will affect Victoria specifically. We know that it will have social and economic impacts. In fact, it already has, just from the transportation perspective. We know from a recent board of trade study that the congestion and gridlock across major cities in Canada is costing the economy up to $3.7 billion a year, not to mention the human costs in premature deaths because of growing air quality problems in our city.

It is also about problems with greenhouse gas emissions, which is what is being discussed right now in Bali. It is about air pollution. It is about water pollution. It is about the need to keep our kids healthy and have a healthful walking environment and healthful sports facilities where they can go. It is about the need to have libraries, where we can create a better learning climate in our cities.

This has resulted in local taxes having to be increased. The choice is either to increase taxes or to continue to allow infrastructure to fail. Only irresponsible governance would allow that. That is what is happening right now in Canada.

The Conservatives' proposal will allow at best under $5 billion a year for infrastructure. We know from the report that the infrastructure deficit will increase to $400 billion within the next 12 years. Just the simple math makes it very clear that we are not going to be able to keep up with the problem. The backlog will continue.

In Victoria, for example, I have seen an aging stormwater system causing polluted and contaminated water to go into our harbour.

Also, I have seen our transit system just trying to keep up with the current demand. We had 21 million in ridership for our city last year, but the system still cannot keep up with the demand. There are continual pass-bys in high ridership areas where people are going to the university or downtown.

Canada is the only G-8 country without a national long term and predictable investment in public transit. That has lasted way too long.

Citizens in greater Victoria want healthy and sustainable communities. A number of groups have been pressing the government to act on this. For example, the IslandTransformations coalition has shown the viability of light rail that is fast, comfortable, safe, non-polluting and inexpensive to operate.

The student-run We Ride campaign is pressing for an improved transit system and affordability. The students cannot get back and forth from university.

The Victoria Transport Institute is working toward concrete solutions for a paradigm shift toward viable alternative transport models, but the federal seat at the table is still vacant. The Conservatives are still talking about a transit strategy and re-announcing old money from what I might say is the NDP budget of 2005.

If we are serious about cutting emissions and keeping our cities livable, we must support long term transit.

I heard one of my colleagues chuckle when I talked about the 2005 budget. The amendment to the Liberal budget was the first reinvestment in transit that had occurred. Or should I say investment? I should not even say reinvestment because we remain the only country without a national strategy for transit.

The Conservative government certainly looked good in last year's budget when it provided a top-up to the municipal rural infrastructure fund and the strategic infrastructure fund to maintain spending. However, the 2006-07 allocation never made it out the door because the government delayed signing agreements.

I suppose it wanted to repackage and re-profile the infrastructure program. The result for municipalities and cities was that there was no new money available for the 2006 construction season--

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

Order. Sorry, but the hon. member's time has run out. On questions and comments, the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my friend describe our government as ineffective. I am sorry, but I just cannot agree with that. She and her party supported a Liberal government that was spending $1.3 billion per year for 12 year or 13 years. We are going to $5 billion a year. She supported that government. I wonder why she will not support us.

If she calls us an ineffective government when we are spending almost four times more, why were she and her party supporting the previous Liberal government that spent so much less? Those members kept the Liberals in power. Obviously she must be embarrassed by that now, because she kept a much more ineffective government in power.

However, we are not saying that we can solve all the infrastructure problems ourselves. There are three levels of government. We are also going to try to leverage public-private partnerships to leverage enough money to make up for the Liberal shortfall, that Liberal deficit of $123 billion in infrastructure.

My question is specifically in regard to British Columbia, where the member's riding is. I wonder if this is what she means by ineffective government: there is a commitment by our government to spend $11.3 million on the E&N Rail Trail, which connects the west shore and downtown Victoria. Or does she call it ineffective government in regard to $7.4 million for stormwater improvements for the Town of View Royal? Is it ineffective government to provide $307 million for TransLink for a purchase of 225 new buses? Is it ineffective government to provide $62.5 million for the Kicking Horse Canyon highway improvement project?

[Denise Savoie, NDP, Victoria, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am certainly the last one who would be supporting the Liberal government. I agree that its investment of $1.1 billion annually was shameful and inadequate. I am saying that faced with the reports and the new information we have, the Conservative government's investment is equally inadequate.

My colleague mentioned the E&N. I am pleased that he raised the issue because I was delighted to hear that announcement. This is precisely an example of a re-announcement of money that had been committed two years before, which was being announced out of the strategic infrastructure program. It is a great project and one that I personally worked on with my colleagues on council. I was pleased to see it, but again, it was a re-announcement. It was not new money.