Mr. Speaker, I am here tonight regarding a question I asked on June 3. On that day, I asked about traffic jams in Toronto and the fact that the C.D. Howe Institute says that they cost the economy $11 billion a year. I asked why the government is investing so little in sustainable transportation infrastructure right now, in fact in infrastructure in general right now.
The minister answered in an over-simplified way, if I could just be kind and gentle. He said simply, “Because you are wrong.” That was all he said. Really. We can see from the video of those proceedings how entertaining the answer was to Conservative MPs. Therefore, the first thing I would like to say is that I hope the government takes the opportunity during these adjournment proceedings to explain how the minister could even answer a question in front of Canadians that way.
Let me talk now about infrastructure. Infrastructure spending is being held back. We know that, without even looking at the numbers, from the experience of Canadian municipalities that are looking to access federal money to work on infrastructure projects that are ready to go. My community of Kingston and the Islands has infrastructure projects that are ready to go. That is because of program delays and low levels of funding from the new Building Canada plan in the first few years, funding that has been pushed back to make sure that there is a balanced budget for the Conservative Party's 2015 election campaign.
David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada, says that now is the time to invest in infrastructure, because in many parts of Canada, such as Ontario, there is plentiful labour, extra industrial capacity, and most importantly, right now interest rates are very low.
Let us look at how much it costs Canada to borrow money. According to the Bank of Canada, the long-term interest rate for Canadian government bonds in June 1984 was 14%. That was the yield on the bonds. In 1994, it went down to 9%. In 2004, it went down to 5%. This year, Canada sold 50-year bonds for a 2.86% yield. That is under 3%. Canada can borrow money for 50 years and pay an interest rate under 3%. What does that mean?
In my original question of the minister, I said that the C.D. Howe Institute said that the economic cost of traffic congestion was $11 billion a year. Let us just take $1 billion a year, one-tenth of that. If we could borrow at an interest rate of 2.86%, we could service the interest payments on $35 billion of infrastructure investment. That is two times the new Building Canada fund, which is only $14 billion.
To conclude, just one-tenth of the annual cost of traffic congestion in Toronto could cover the interest payments needed to pay for two of this government's new Building Canada plans. That is how unambitious the government is.