Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to engage in this debate. For viewers of this debate and other MPs in this House, I want to begin my comments by framing what the motion is all about .
The motion does two things. First, it calls upon the federal government to impose a full greenhouse gas emission impact study for every single federally funded infrastructure project over the value of $500,000. Second, it calls upon the federal government to give priority to infrastructure proposals which specifically mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, notwithstanding the clearly expressed preferences of municipalities or provincial governments.
I do not question the motive behind this motion. It has to do with ensuring governments at all levels exercise wise environmental stewardship. We can all agree on that.
Sadly, the wording of this motion is reflective of how Liberal governments cannot resist the urge to overreach and increase red tape by interfering in the affairs of cash-strapped local and provincial governments, and in the lives of ordinary Canadians.
What this motion is about is essentially a big government solution for a perceived local government challenge. Essentially, when we talk about big government, we are talking about big costs. Who bears the cost of this? That is where my criticisms are focused.
First, these additional costs for municipalities will be imposed without guaranteeing any value for the money that is spent.
Second, the decisions on local infrastructure priorities will no longer be made exclusively on the merits of the projects and the needs of local communities.
Third, what the motion really does, if the government follows through on it, is it indirectly intrudes on provincial and municipal jurisdiction. Why do I say that? Most of these projects will be cost-shared, either fifty-fifty between the federal government and the municipality or the provincial government, or a tripartite funding agreement, one-third, one-third, one-third.
Most of these projects will actually be funded one-third, one-third, one-third, with the federal government only contributing one-third of the cost and yet imposing upon municipalities the requirement to embark upon a very expensive greenhouse gas emission assessment process.
The large majority of these projects, of course, are going to take place in the 4,000 municipalities across this country. I asked a question earlier of the sponsor of this bill, whether he had actually consulted with those municipalities and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. He did not actually give me a straight answer, but it was pretty clear that the answer was a big resounding no. It was the same thing with the provinces and territories. Were they consulted? It appears they were not.
Who bears the expense and cost of this? It is going to be the provinces, territories, and the municipalities across Canada.
We talked about partnerships. I will talk a little about Abbotsford, the city I represent.
We have a recently completed project, funded under our previous Conservative government, the Mill Lake Spray Park. It was a small project. It does not have serious greenhouse gas emission impacts, but that project would be captured by this motion and would have to go through the expensive review process. We are talking about not only upstream, but downstream greenhouse gas emission impacts as well. This is horrifically expensive. We are talking about a significant amount of research that has to be done. We are talking about a lot of time spent putting together the information to make this assessment, and tremendous costs to local communities.
We have to understand that the priority setting that takes place for these projects, the design and engineering, the costing, and all of the other fundamental work on these projects is done at the local level. They will be the ones who will have to pay the cost for this ill-advised motion. These requirements capture most of the infrastructure projects that will be built by municipalities across Canada.
I am a former city councillor. I spent nine years as a city councillor, as well as five years on a local school board. I have become keenly sensitive to the pressures that municipalities face. They are stretched to the max. Many of them no longer have any ability to raise tax revenues to meet the demands of their residents.
In fact, this all goes back to the 13 long dark years of the former Liberal government under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. What did they do? After years of accumulating national debt they realized there was a problem. However, instead of making the tough decisions, controlling spending, as we in the Conservative government did, and controlling the growth of government, they looked for an easy target. That easy target was the provinces and territories. They downloaded billions of dollars. It was somewhere around $20 billion a year of federal government transfers, which were intended to support the provinces in providing health care, social services, and education. The provinces were left with this crater in their budgets. What did they in turn do? They looked for the next target, which was municipalities.
I remember, in one year alone we had approximately $3 million of cutbacks of provincial transfers dumped on us in the municipality in Abbotsford. The impact was so significant. Many municipalities across the country have yet to recover from that. In fact, our former Conservative government tried to address that. We actually went out of our way to double the amount of gas tax funding for municipalities. On top of that, we made that gas tax program permanent to try to help our municipalities grapple with these demands for services but a declining tax base.
We can see where this all comes down. I asked whether the motion's sponsor had actually consulted with our municipalities across the country. It is pretty clear he did not. The reason I wanted him to advise us of that is that our municipalities across the country have made it very clear. In fact the 2015 Federation of Canadian Municipalities' report on local climate action across Canada highlighted the disparity between municipalities with capacity to undertake detailed environmental analyses and those that lack the human resources, scientific, and planning expertise to afford to do that.
That is the case here. The motion is imposing additional burdens on our municipalities, and many of the projects that are captured under the motion should never actually require these assessments to be done.
This is an example of top-down government, a failure to respect the knowledge and wisdom of local communities. It is all being done in the absence of the long promised pan-Canadian framework on climate change, which the Prime Minister promised in Paris he would deliver within 90 days in Vancouver. I was in Vancouver. Was it delivered? No, it was not.
We have these ad hoc environmental initiatives and greenhouse gas emission reduction initiatives being implemented by the Liberal government willy-nilly without an overarching national climate change plan. In fact, they are spending $2.65 billion in foreign countries, without us even having a national climate change plan in place.
Therefore, the bottom line is this. All Canadians expect their government to take action on protecting our environment and meeting our environmental challenges. However, those efforts should never displace investment in critical infrastructure driven by the priorities of the municipalities, the provinces, and the territories. As governments address those environmental commitments, we need to be selective in determining which projects merit greenhouse gas emission assessments and which do not. Otherwise, we are wasting taxpayers' dollars. Of course, the motion does not in any way contain those safeguards.
I will conclude. It is very simple. Of the many effective tools government has available to address greenhouse gas emissions, this motion is not and should not be one of those tools.