Mr. Speaker, the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report two weeks ago in which she notes that the funding in the so-called new infrastructure fund is actually a reprofiling of old funds that have not been spent because a lot of the infrastructure projects have been very slow in getting approval. That is why the municipalities have not received the funds and why the federal government still has a chunk of cash left.
Instead of just transferring that funding as quickly as possible to the municipalities, what the federal government did was take the old money and say that it was a new infrastructure fund, except it is being spread out over a much longer period of time. As a result, the PBO has said that we would be cut by $2 billion each year. We would have $2 billion less in municipal transfer of federal funds for infrastructure projects than last year. It would be the same in 2014-15 . We would have $2 billion less compared to the year before.
In the meantime, because the so-called gas tax indexing would not kick in until 2015 and this so-called new funding would really not kick in until after 2015, we would be losing $4 billion in total in the next two years.