Madam Speaker, I would like to begin on a point of consensus. I believe all members of the House support investment in infrastructure. We sometimes differ on how those funds are allocated. For example, in the recent federal budget, transit funding was allocated based on ridership, which is probably a good deal for a city like Toronto that has a very well-developed transit system, but it does not do much to help a city like Regina that needs funding to extend its transit system.
Looking at the province of Saskatchewan as a whole, we will receive less than 1% of the transit funding from the budget, even though we comprise more than 3% of Canada's population.
Another area on which we sometimes differ is the conditions that government applies to infrastructure investment. The previous Conservative government required projects to be organized as public-private partnerships in order to receive federal funding. One of the problems with that is that public-private partnerships effectively involve paying a private business to borrow money at a higher interest rate than the government itself could access.
I was very active in the referendum campaign in Regina to keep our new waste water treatment plant public. However, the city privatized this facility because it needed to be a P3 in order to receive federal funding.
During the campaign, I talked about removing this restriction from federal infrastructure funding. I am very pleased that the federal government has now promised to do exactly that. We should be deciding on a case-by-case basis what financing model makes the most sense for which infrastructure projects. We should not have the government arbitrarily saying that they have to be P3s.
I am happy to work with the government to implement that change, but I am also disappointed that the government has increased funding to PPP Canada, because that money, by definition, will only be available to projects that organize themselves as P3s.
Another type of condition that we could talk about for infrastructure funding is domestic or local procurement. If one of the goals of infrastructure spending is to boost the Canadian economy, then it certainly makes sense to buy domestic inputs and to hire Canadian workers.
I would recognize community benefit agreements as being one way of ensuring that public infrastructure spending translates into local jobs and local training opportunities.
The New Democrats definitely support the basic principle behind the bill. However, it is also important to talk about some of the bill's limitations.
As was explained by the member for York South—Weston, the bill would allow the minister to negotiate community benefit agreements, but it would not commit the government to do anything. It is also important to note that this is being put forward as a private member's bill rather than as government legislation.
I am sure the member for York South—Weston is putting forward the bill in good faith, but let us also recognize that the Liberals have more history of talking about community benefit agreements without actually doing very much.
The member for York South—Weston talked about a Metrolinx project at the Eglinton LRT that included a community benefit agreement. I would like to talk about another Metrolinx project. This was the construction of the Union Pearson Express. Let us remember, Metrolinx is a crown corporation of the provincial Liberal government. In building this hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Union Pearson Express upgrades, it refused to create apprenticeships and almost none of the workers were hired locally. Therefore, there is a big difference between talking about community benefit agreements and actually implementing them.
Another limitation of the bill is that the government is simultaneously pushing ahead with trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that will restrict subnational procurement. I have already asked whether the government is confident that community benefit agreements will not be challenged under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
I think we heard two answers to this point in the debate. One was that the analogous Ontario legislation so far has survived trade challenges, but obviously it has not been in place under the TPP, so it is hard to know whether it will survive that agreement. The other answer we heard is that the TPP includes some sort of a carve-out for minority hiring, and that is not overly surprising given that the United States is involved in the agreement and does have some of those requirements itself. However, it is not clear to me that this exemption is really going to be effective in allowing all of the community benefit agreements that we have talked about during the course of this debate. I think there is a real risk that Liberal trade policy is going to contradict the spirit if not the letter of the bill.
I would also like to take a moment to respond to some of the points made by the Conservatives in this debate.
I was very impressed by the number of times the member for Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis used the term “red tape”. I do not know if he set a record for this Parliament, but it was quite a performance and I salute him for that. However, I do not think that just calling something red tape is necessarily a good argument. Let me be clear, the bill would not apply requirements to private construction projects. What it is saying is that if a company wants to bid on a government infrastructure project, some of the contractual requirements could involve hiring local workers, providing local training, and those sorts of things. Therefore, I really do not think that it makes a lot sense to call that red tape any more than we call any other type of requirement written into a contract red tape.
The other argument we heard from the member for Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, which I found maybe a little bit contradictory, was that the former Conservative government had done a lot of good things to mandate the hiring of veterans as apprentices. It sounded to me like that was maybe an example of a community benefit-type agreement that worked, and certainly not something we would want to dismiss as being red tape.
In summary, I am going to vote for the bill, but I am skeptical as to how many community benefit agreements it will actually produce. To the extent that it does produce community benefit agreements, I am skeptical that they will survive Liberal trade policy.