Madam Speaker, the hon. member calls on us to increase the gas tax in order to pass more money to municipal politicians. That is a matter of disagreement. We on this side of the House believe in leaving more money in the pockets of the hard-working taxpayers who earned it, rather than taxing them more and more at every stop.
Now he is trying to deny what he was saying earlier. He said he wants us to transfer more gas tax revenue to the municipalities. The reality is that money has to come from somewhere. If we are going to increase the transfer of gas tax money, and there are no extra dollars hiding under anyone's pillow, the only way to pay for it is through an increase in the gas tax. That is precisely what the NDP is proposing.
The NDP is doing this in an environment where municipalities have enjoyed an explosion in federal transfers over the last decade and a half. It was not very long ago that the federal government did not fund any municipal or provincial infrastructure. That changed starting about a decade and a half ago and the increases have been spectacular. The annual transfer of federal funding for provincial and municipal infrastructure reached $9 billion, an all-time high last year. This is an incredible amount of money for taxpayers to be spending on municipal and provincial infrastructure at the federal level. The good news is that we have achieved results in exchange for the dollars spent.
I am looking at a graph demonstrating the average age of a core piece of infrastructure in Canada. The average age was 17 years a decade ago. Today, it is 14.5 years. We have now reached the stage that our infrastructure is the most youthful it has been since the 1980s. This fact is the result of a massive build-up of new infrastructure and a renewal by communities of their infrastructure assets. This is an objective way of measuring the quality and the renewal of the infrastructure that the Canadian people use. I am pleased to report to the House that this objective measurement points to improvements in the degree of renewal of infrastructure across the country. Therefore, we are getting results for the Canadian people.
The NDP members will always want us to spend more money. I would remind them it is true that government can give people everything they want, but it will have to take everything they have in order to pay for it.