Mr. Speaker, it is a real honour to rise today to speak on this important piece of proposed legislation. I congratulate the hon. member for Trinity—Spadina for introducing it. Certainly she has a lot of experience in the field of municipal infrastructure and a background as an elected official at a municipal level, which perhaps explains why she is so interested in the direct management and operations of public transit.
While that knowledge and background adds to her ability to serve in this House, I think it has also caused her to put forward a proposal that would have the federal government overstretch its jurisdictional bounds and participate directly in the operations of an otherwise municipally-controlled and run service.
Paragraph 4(b)(ii) of the bill proposes that the federal government would fund the operations of municipal infrastructure. That is a fundamental change to the way our government has functioned in this country since its founding. The Government of Canada has, for years, provided capital funding for qualifying projects within municipalities. The government provides a stable stream of revenue for municipalities through the gas tax fund; then those municipalities take those gas tax dollars and apply them where they believe appropriate, within some limited federal confines. Sometimes they use it for transit, other times not.
The federal government does not, even in this fund, provide dollars for operations, nor should it. For reasons of both good management and constitutional jurisdiction, the Government of Canada cannot and must not fund operations.
Let us start with good management. As Napoleon once said, “Better one bad general than two good ones”. The same goes for the idea of having two levels of government run the same transit system at the same time. When Canadians assess the quality of a service, they should know who provides it. The municipalities are entrusted with the operation of public transit because it is the municipal government that is closest to the people who use that particular service. If the system fails the voters in that given municipality, they know whom to blame; if it succeeds, they know whom to thank. That is accountability.
If every level of government is responsible for operating the same bus route, then no government is responsible for it. Let us consider the scenario that follows.
Let us imagine a rapid transit line that is failing commuters: its service is poor, its costs are unacceptably high and its trains never run on time. With the passage of this bill, no one could be held accountable for the poor operation of that service. Operations would be shared between orders of government. No one, therefore, can really accept the blame for that scenario.
Clear division of responsibility, therefore, is essential to good management and accountability.
I will now move on to constitutional responsibility. Section 92(8) of the Constitution states that municipalities are creatures of the provinces. Our forebears did not make it so by accident. If municipalities are the government closest to the people and the provinces are the second closest, it follows that the former are creatures of the latter. To have the federal government jump over the provinces and jointly operate services with the municipal administrations would create a cobweb of funding and management that would render the entire system unruly for both taxpayers and commuters.
The bill seems to acknowledge this point, to its credit, in clause 3. Clause 3 of the proposed act exempts Quebec, in recognition of that province's legitimate historical desire to protect its jurisdiction from federal encroachment. That makes sense.
Why would the equally legitimate jurisdictions of the nine other provinces and three other territories, all of which live under the same Constitution, not then enjoy the same exemption?
The reason is that the bill seems to go beyond the legitimate powers given to the federal government in the Constitution.
That brings us to the practical reason that our forebears created a system in this way--that is, the unfairness in a bill that would provide special funds for a service that only some Canadians could enjoy.
One of the benefits of our system of gas tax transfer is that it goes on a per capita basis to the municipalities. Some municipalities do not use public transit because they do not have the geography or population concentration to benefit from it, so chances are that people who live in Iqaluit or Wainwright or another smaller municipal jurisdiction in this country do not have a major public transit facility that their municipality could benefit from under the funding proposed in this bill. Only large urban centres would receive the funds, even though taxpayers from all sorts of municipalities would be forced to contribute to the annual operating costs of those transit projects.
This is compensated for in the system that we have at a national level, whereby the federal government invests in transit systems at a capital level when municipalities seek it, and then invests in other projects more appropriate for small jurisdictions when those municipalities seek funding. It might be a water treatment plant in Kentville, while it might be a large urban transit project in Trinity—Spadina.
This bill fails to acknowledge the difference between those two different types of jurisdictions, and would thus create a funding inequity through which funding received by large urban centres for municipal projects would not be offset with corresponding benefits for smaller jurisdictions.
That brings us to the next issue, which is cost. Like time, dollars are finite. We must remember that every time someone demands the government extend a benefit, the government cannot provide any benefit without first taking it away. Governments do not have money. Only taxpayers do. Given that the government is currently in a deficit, the only way to pay for new funding commitments, as this bill prescribes, is through more borrowing or higher taxes, neither of which are acknowledged in this bill, nor would they be defensible to the taxpayer. We must focus relentlessly on deficit elimination by the scheduled 2014 target date and we must do it through spending restraint.
For these reasons, and while we respect the good intentions of the bill and its author, the government is obliged to present opposition to the bill and will be voting against it. That being said, we look forward to working with all members of the House in order to improve the transportation and infrastructure that Canadians enjoy so that we can continue to move forward as the greatest country in the world.