Mr. Speaker, there are serious gaps in this budget in terms of commitments to our country. One of the huge gaps that I see is in the area of Northern Ontario, where we have the Ring of Fire development. This development would be a transformative project for the economy of our entire region, not just in the coming years but in the coming generations.
Indigenous communities living in dire poverty in the Ring of Fire region are looking to participate, but they need the infrastructure, the roads, the support to build a project that would transform our economy.
The Kathleen Wynne government had demanded the old Conservative government put $1 billion into the project before the provincial Liberals would do anything, and of course the provincial Liberals have done nothing. Now the Kathleen Wynne Liberals are not asking the federal Liberals to put up a dime, and the government has lived up to that promise: the federal Liberals do not have a dime in the budget for a transformative resource development project that would involve indigenous communities and transform our economy.
I hear all this talk about infrastructure and how the Liberal government is looking to build an economy. Why, then, has it ignored one of the most important development projects in our nation, particularly in the north of Canada? There has been no consultation, and the government has given us no plan for our communities to survive economically.