Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise today to speak to Bill C-29, the budget implementation act.
Prior to my role as the member for the Bay of Quinte, I served for eight years as the mayor of the City of Belleville. My municipal experience gave me a full appreciation of the impact that infrastructure has on our communities.
The city of Belleville, having a population of 50,000, and being a small urban municipality, has many infrastructure deficits. Investments in infrastructure provide communities with safe roads, clean water and air, efficient transportation networks, and so much more. Our infrastructure needs have outpaced our investments for decades, and at significant cost.
The perfect storm is here. It is hurting our communities. It is very important that we keep driving investment and finding new alternative ways to support the needs of our communities.
Neglected aging infrastructure directly contributes to traffic congestion, which pollutes the air and stifles the productivity of our workers and businesses. It contributes to boil water advisories that affect the health of entire communities. It means that our seniors have a harder time accessing essential services, and that some of our population have great difficulty finding safe and affordable places to live.
As I have personally experienced, underfunded infrastructure puts our cities at a competitive disadvantage. When competing to attract top companies, either the local market or the global market, it is hard to create good-paying jobs without proper infrastructure.
The City of Belleville was like so many other communities across Canada, starved for infrastructure funding and facing a mounting infrastructure deficit. Upon being elected as mayor, I began to see first-hand just how large this infrastructure deficit was in our community, and how it was growing with no real plan to fix it.
Speaking with my colleagues at AMO, association of Ontario mayors, 444 of us excluding Toronto, I realized that most municipalities in Ontario had aging infrastructure. I was finding in my community that we were not unique. Small urban communities and cities across Canada were in a similar position. There was simply no infrastructure funding to meet the needs of municipalities. The tax system with municipalities is basically property taxes and user fees. Municipalities provide 66% of our services in Ontario, yet collect only around 8¢ on the tax dollar.
The City of Belleville, an average small city, has over $3.5 billion worth of assets. This includes roads, bridges—69 bridges, I believe—public facilities, water, waste water plants, which were all built in the forties, fifties and sixties. However, they never had an asset management plan to keep these structures in repair.
After examining this asset management plan, I realized that our city was in trouble. We had approximately 350 in terms of millions of dollars in a past deficit that was hidden, a deficit that was not on our books, and a deficit that kept growing out of control. It was a construction deficit that was increasing at the time between 5% and 10%. We had interest rates that we were able to acquire at approximately 2.5% locked in. It is all about capital risk. Being a small business person myself, one of the biggest problems is obtaining capital, locked in, at an amount that could get rid of the risk.
With Infrastructure Ontario, we were able to build a plan, and our solution was a build Belleville plan. This was the second infrastructure plan to try to alleviate some of the infrastructure that was stockpiled to the city over the last 25 years.
The rationale is simple. Each year that the cost of infrastructure repairs are left and not taken care of, they increase. All of a sudden, a $300-million deficit becomes a $330-million or $340-million deficit. With infrastructure, we are not quite sure what the costs will be, so it is floating.
Coming up with a plan for locking in our capital risk, recognizing that interest rates were low, it was time to launch a plan and try to convince council that we needed to mitigate the risk of bridges collapsing. We had to mitigate the risk of not having a waste water plant that was capable of meeting our industry.
City council supported build Belleville and the $91.5 million loan for the first stage of infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. The build Belleville plan was featured in many trade publications, including Canada Business Review, Municipal World, The Undergrounder and ReNew.
The program not only attracted the attention of magazines and media, it attracted a great deal of attention from municipalities. In 2008, I was asked to speak at AMO, to all mayors about the plan.
My city is also in the plan. It expanded our industrial park by extending roads and services to build our economic base. It has put us in a very great position now to attract industry and create more jobs.
This past August, I met with local mayors to announce over $7 million in federal gas tax funding. This is specifically for municipal infrastructure projects. More recently, I held an announcement event at our local college, Loyalist College, for a $1.6-million federal investment toward a $3.2-million renovation of the Northumberland wing and health and wellness centre. The wellness centre hosts the school's highly respected practical nursing program and state-of-the-art clinical simulation lab.
This investment will make for greater energy efficiency, which has positive impacts both on the environment and the school's operating budget. Of course, it will significantly improve the learning environment and hopefully keep our youth and our community educated, and help in the workforce.
These are good reasons why it is so vitally important that we continue to work with our municipal and provincial partners across the country to develop a long-term infrastructure plan that meets the real needs of all communities across Canada.
Our government will provide more than $180 billion over 12 years for public transit, green and social infrastructure, and trade and transportation. These investments will have a dramatic impact on all communities across Canada, including small communities and rural regions. The plan provides unprecedented levels of funding for projects across the country, projects that will help create long-term economic growth; build safe, inclusive, and sustainable communities; and support a low-carbon, green economy.
Budget 2016 launched the first phase of our infrastructure plan, which will invest a total of $11.9 billion. This includes $3.4 billion for public transit systems, $5 billion for green infrastructure projects, and $3.4 billion for social infrastructure, which includes affordable housing.
During my community pre-budget consultations, our not-for-profit agencies could not stress enough the importance of investment in safe and affordable housing. The first phase of this investment makes possible repairs and upgrades to long neglected critical infrastructure. Bilateral agreements were signed with all the provinces and territories, and more than 750 projects have already been improved.
Projects are already under way in our rural and smaller communities such as: waste-water upgrades in Red Deer, hard surfacing of the Trans-Labrador Highway, upgrades to the town of Lanigan's water facilities in Saskatchewan, rehabilitation of bridges in the Northwest Territories, a new Pond Inlet small craft harbour in Nunavut, and a water treatment plant upgrade in my neighbouring town of Deseronto.
We have also made major investments in infrastructure projects for public transit that once complete will help drastically reduce congestion in our cities, and get all moms and dads home earlier, hopefully, to spend time with their families and to get their families safely home. They are things like the light rail transit in Ottawa, the Toronto Toronto Commission surface track replacement program, the Waterloo Fairview Mall transit terminal, and the Trent-Severn Waterway National Historic Site, for a total investment of $267 million.
I had the great honour, on a hot summer day, to be with a great Conservative member, the member for Simcoe North, in Peterborough to cut the ribbon on the announcement of the Trent-Severn system, which affects my community, as the Trent Port Marina in Quinte West is the start of the Trent. I invite everyone to visit the Trent Port Marina in their boats this year, and come and enjoy our wineries and our cities.
Equipping municipalities with the resources they need and access to low-risk capital is essential to sustain and grow our communities, providing the building blocks they need to thrive and succeed. Infrastructure is an essential component for healthy, vibrant communities, and creates the conditions for sustainable economic growth and development. Investments in infrastructure are investments in our future and that of our children.
