Health committee  What a terrific question. It's hard to answer in such a contained forum.

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I want to be as clear as I possibly can on this. If the federal government wishes to take the tack of a tax credit for transit riders, we take no issue with that. In fact, we're perfectly able to support that and not stand in opposition to that positi

Health committee  Absolutely. I thank the committee member for his question. It's an excellent point and something that I did want to highlight as part of my presence here today. We would encourage the federal government categorically to move towards a dedicated stream of funding for recreationa

Health committee  I can try. Regrettably, I can't necessarily say I'm an expert in what we are expecting in terms of ridership. I can tell you anecdotally from our perspective, because of the tax credit, we would expect a slight increase in transit ridership in municipalities, for example in Win

Health committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairperson. I'm Gord Steeves and I'm a councillor from Winnipeg. I'm also the vice-president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is the organization that represents all municipal government from acro

Finance committee  I'm from Winnipeg, not Saskatchewan, so I can't comment in much detail on the Saskatchewan programs. Candidly, in terms of our file at FCM, housing is one of the most difficult because provincial and territorial legislation is different right across the provinces. There are dif

Finance committee  That's a fair comment, and as I said before, it remains as an emerging issue in terms of infrastructure funding. The primary request, sir, would still be the traditional hard infrastructure that we've requested all along. I certainly don't want the fact that we've included it as

Finance committee  I hope I was clear in my comments. If I wasn't, I apologize. We certainly didn't mean to allude that we have been ignored by the federal government. That was not my intent. We do feel bridges have been built—no pun intended—and we feel we've come a long way. Within the context of

Finance committee  Those have been concerns for a long time, and obviously they are a huge issue. Part of the problem, from our perspective in municipalities, is that when the money flows from the federal government to provinces, there can be all sorts of problems in terms of provincial offsets of

Finance committee  That's exactly the concern.

Finance committee  I believe it was, yes.

Finance committee  Your question was telling and a bit concerning, although I like the area that we're talking about. We are always concerned about the relationship between the federal government and the provinces—not that we have an issue with that, but we want to ensure that our relationship wit

Finance committee  We've been invited to numerous meetings with the relevant ministers at this stage, and we've had a chance to sit down on numerous occasions with different ministers, so that has happened. We feel our concerns are on the table and that they've been heard. We've had requests from t

Finance committee  As I said, we're in the process of working with a variety ministries on their positions for the budget. At this stage, they seem to be, in an integral type of way, asking for our input. We're hoping our concerns and our needs are recognized at the end of the day. We're in the pro

Finance committee  I'll ask Jim to comment after I make a few comments. Our position at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is that our needs should be able to be met without any net tax increase across the board. We've never advocated a tax increase at any level of government to address our