Transport committee  Oh, theoretically.

Transport committee  One could imagine a different public transit fund if you wanted to get into the theoretical, but we're dealing with an economic reality in a context of an announcement made by a government, so we're working with that reality.

Transport committee  Yes. I think it's unfair to characterize in a simple way a decision a municipality makes as a short-sighted investment, as opposed to an asset management investment. It's just not that simple. Municipalities are faced with enormous pressures and enormous challenges, and so decisi

Transport committee  We recognize there is kind of a national vision here that drives the sustainability agenda through effective asset management that drives an agenda of effective investment and effective priority setting using good asset management. You need the provinces and territories involved

Transport committee  We don't have a specific dollar figure. We've been saying that the investment level in the 1950s and 1960s was one that is appropriate to be sustained. It's not a particular number of billions of dollars a year. We don't have that kind of precision in our analysis. I certainly wo

Transport committee  It does vary based on several variables. Some of it could be due to pressure of economic activity and population growth. The climate, the north, and the changing climate of the north, is a different variable on the pressure of the infrastructure in that area. Generally speaki

Transport committee  It's mentioned, especially when you have programs that have a very short timeframe, for example, the economic action plan. I mean, we all knew that it was a very intense moment, had a very tight timeframe, but that intensity did drive up cost. We know that. One of the challenges

Transport committee  You've hit the nail on the head with respect to our concerns around the public transit fund with respect to P3s, not that it's being managed by PPP Canada; that's just a management framework for a funding mechanism. Our concern is to ensure that the municipality has the decision-

Transport committee  Yes. The gas tax is something we've always said is the ideal model.

Transport committee  We've been on record since the day the building Canada fund was announced as saying that we felt there needed to be a clear indication from the federal government of the percentage of the building Canada fund that should be dedicated to municipal infrastructure, so that whatever

Transport committee  No. There was a decision made that what we were putting forward would not be moved forward. The federal government made a decision in that way.

Transport committee  I can't see that graph to know the specific dip you are referring to. Our analysis is, as I mentioned earlier, that in the 1950s and 1960s there was significant investment, close to but not quite 5% of GDP all in; so all orders of government were investing in infrastructure to bu

Transport committee  Are the funds being distributed quickly? No. I think the challenge for our members is that the federal government and the provincial and territorial governments are not necessarily prioritizing municipal infrastructure. Whatever the criteria is for the decisions that are being

Transport committee  No, we don't have an advisory body of that nature. What we do have is that in our membership, each of the provincial and territorial municipal government associations is part of our network, part of our membership, and as a lot of this is being driven through the provincial and t

Transport committee  I think part of the challenge, frankly, is that there hasn't been a clear direction from the federal government in the building Canada fund to allocate or to set aside a certain percentage of funding specifically for municipal infrastructure. It's such an open playing field that