Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak to the NDP opposition day motion put forward by my colleague, a champion of Canadian municipalities, the member for Trinity—Spadina.
The basis for the motion today is fundamentally economic, and it is succinctly captured in the submission from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to the government on this matter last November. The introduction to that submission reads in part:
Municipal infrastructure provides the foundation on which our economy rests. Small businesses need quality roads and bridges to deliver goods and services. Workers need fast, efficient public transit to connect them with jobs. And growing companies count on high-quality community services, from libraries to hockey rinks, to attract skilled workers. Yet today, those foundations are buckling under the strain.
In these terms, support for today's motion seems pretty obvious, and so it is that there is a broad near consensus outside of this House for the motion we are discussing today. As we will hear throughout the day, the call for a long-term, predictable, accountable federal infrastructure plan in partnership with other levels of government is supported by business leaders, trade unions, economists, civil society organizations, experts of all kinds and, of course, municipal leaders.
I say “near consensus” because there are still those who seem to lie outside this consensus. They are, curiously enough, the two federal parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, who have swapped power back and forth over the last 40-plus years, as they withdrew investment, indeed withdrew the federal government, and watched the foundations of our economy and municipalities crumble.
In seven years of government, the Conservatives have yet to even acknowledge the urban reality of the country we live in, the fact that nearly 80% of Canadians live in cities. They seem entirely incapable of imagining a Canadian economy other than resource extraction or a Canadian economy led by the necessarily social urban process of innovation. Thus, we get the dismantling of federal environmental framework to facilitate resource extraction, in place of a modern and environmentally sustainable economic strategy that sees cities as the place to research, develop, create, innovate and exploit the enormous opportunities to tackle climate change.
The Liberal Party is the same, having reduced infrastructure funding throughout the 1990s. It has never given more than lip service and pennies when real full dollars were called for. More than that, it downloaded federal fiscal challenges to other orders of government, ultimately to our cities, which is the order of government least able to maintain, much less build, infrastructure, collecting, as they do, only eight cents on the dollar in tax revenue.
We can watch the trend line of investment in infrastructure as it goes steadily down from its high of about 3% of GDP in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to bouncing along the bottom through the latest Liberal majority governments at about 1.5%. That difference represents about $24 billion in missing annual investment in public infrastructure, according to a recent study. That same study shows that net investment in infrastructure was actually negative for two years of Liberal government, as existing public infrastructure stock depreciated faster than new development.
Now, if all else had stayed the same, that would be one thing; that would be trouble enough. However, the technological, political and economic context has been changing as well over the last 40 years. Broadly, we call it “globalization”, but the implication is that old ways of governance have to give way to new ways of governance that recognize the political and economic importance of urban regions and economies. As one observer put it, “A practical implication is that cities have become central to the study of federalism”.
Therefore, this motion takes place in the context of Canadian federal politics that is and has been for very many years out of step with the rest of the developed world in terms of its understanding and respect for the role of our cities in a global economy in generating wealth for our country. In most other developed countries and economies, governments have become major players in the financial, economic and cultural life of their cities, and it is past time for ours to do the same.
Instead, we are left with this enormous infrastructure deficit, estimated at over $170 billion. It is a deficit that is so obvious to every citizen of my city, the city of Toronto.
We have famed urbanist and urban economist Jane Jacobs, who could say of Toronto in 1969, “Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options”. By 2004, in her book Dark Age Ahead, she described the town that she had made her home as “a city in crisis; indeed, multiple crises”. However, one need not have the keen eye of Jacobs to be frustrated and concerned. As the Conservatives and Liberals swapped power back and forth over the last 40 years, the contours of these crises, to use Jacobs' term, became increasingly obvious.
For those who have not witnessed their emergence, as Jacobs did, the transition over 40-plus years has been amply and convincingly recorded in statistics and maps by University of Toronto Professor David Hulchanski and colleagues. That could take us through 40 years of growing social and spatial inequity and economic decline in a kind of tour de force of time-lapse cartography. The final image we are left with is a Toronto that has been divided into three socially, economically and spatially discrete cities within the city, with great swaths of Toronto's geography characterized by the absence of infrastructure. These are infrastructure deserts of various kinds.
We have in Toronto what the Toronto board of trade calls “a conundrum”, a city of strong economic fundamentals, but not world-leading productivity, GDP or disposable income growth. With the Toronto region providing nearly 50% of Ontario's GDP and 20% of Canada's GDP, solving this conundrum seems imperative. The board of trade itself points to infrastructure as what needs to be addressed first and foremost. It describes it as “the biggest threat to our continued growth and economic prosperity in the Toronto region and Ontario generally”.
While the lack of infrastructure, and the crumbling infrastructure generally, poses an enormous obstacle to Toronto's growth and prosperity, it is public transit that is the top priority of the board's members because of “its outsized impact on the Toronto region's global competitiveness”. This is an analysis and priority shared by many other organizations studying Toronto's economy in the global context.
As of 2006, it was estimated that the cost of congestion to the economy of the Toronto region was $6 billion annually. That is an old figure now. However, the outlook is even more grim as Toronto continues to grow, with one of the fastest urban growth rates globally. Every year we add about 100,000 people to our city, so that within 20 years Toronto will be 50% bigger. Absent any significant action, the productivity cost of poor public transit will skyrocket to an estimated $15 billion annually. In terms that are more easy to relate to, that means Toronto commuters, already experiencing the longest commute times in North America, can look forward to spending an extra three work weeks per year stuck in traffic.
We are the only OECD and G8 country without a national transit strategy. At our economic peril, do we continue to be so. It is well past time for the government to drop its aversion to thinking ahead and put in place, in partnership with other levels of government, a long-term, predictable infrastructure plan. Join the consensus.
The crises that Jane Jacobs referred to are, in her terms, “the tangible consequences of tangible mistakes”. They need not be so forever. We can fix these problems and grasp the great opportunities that lie before us. To start, we should support today's motion.