Mr. Speaker, in the municipal sector it is called the “inaction plan”. As someone who has struggled with eight years of city budgets, trying to put them together without consistent, predictable, and robust funding, the very things the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is asking for, I just listened to that and it blew my mind.
I have talked to more than a dozen mayors in the last two weeks. There is no infrastructure money in their budgets from last year and none is expected this year. It is a problem that needs to be addressed. Part of the problem is that the subscription process is so complicated for the provinces that even they cannot figure out how to get the federal money flowing. The only thing that has happened is the $29 million worth of billboards that have been posted at the sides of roads as we wait for someone to come to pave the highway. It is a problem. If the government would meet with the premiers, as this motion requests it do, it would find out why its rhetoric does not meet reality.
The programs the government talked about were hand-picked programs during the bailout that had nothing to do with municipal priorities. No matter much how much the cities cried, no matter how much the provinces demanded to meet, there was absolutely no consensus and no ability for local governments to drive local priorities.
Will the government sit down with the provincial premiers and figure this out before we lose another season of construction and wait 10 years for the money to arrive?