Mr. Speaker, we acknowledge the importance of infrastructure investment in cities and communities across the country. We also recognize the diversity of the needs from coast to coast to coast. That is why our government has continued to make long-term, predictable funding for public infrastructure a priority.

In 2007, we announced $33 billion in stable, flexible and predictable funding to the 7-year building Canada plan. Fresh on the heels of launching this plan, our government responded quickly to the economic crisis in 2009 with $5.25 billion more in infrastructure stimulus investments. In fact, the infrastructure stimulus fund supported over 4,000 projects across the country.

Collectively, this funding has had a significant impact. As a result of these investments, the average age of Canada's infrastructure has been steadily decreasing from 17.8 years in 2000, to 14.7 years in 2013.

More recent, economic action plan 2013 announced $70 billion for public infrastructure over the next decade. This of course includes the $53 billion new building Canada plan, the largest and the longest-term infrastructure plan in Canadian history, providing stable funding for a 10 year period. Seventy per cent of the funds available through the plan directly support infrastructure in cities and communities across the country.

In addition, just last month, our Prime Minister announced another $5.8 billion to address federal infrastructure priorities that will have long lasting benefits, including job creation. In total, that is over $75 billion that will be injected into the economy over the coming decade to support public infrastructure in communities across the country.

The new building Canada plan has been open for business since March 2014, and these programs are well under way. We are working with provinces and territories to identify projects. In fact, it is the responsibility of provinces to identify those project priorities. When they are provided to us, we are processing proposals as quickly as they come in. In fact, close to a billion dollars in federal funding for regional and national projects have already been announced, and we look forward to announcing many more in the year ahead.

Funding will begin to flow for these priority projects as construction begins and costs are incurred. This is solid stewardship of public funds and a principle we have applied since 2006.

In addition, we made close to $2 billion available to municipalities in 2014 alone under the now permanent, doubled and indexed federal gas tax fund. The city of Calgary is getting that federal gas tax funding directly.

As we clearly can see from the continuous federal investments in public infrastructure, there has been no break in federal funding since 2007, and money continues to be available to our cities and communities to address their infrastructure priorities. No federal government has ever made a stronger commitment to supporting public infrastructure.

Peter Braid

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Adjournment Proceedings

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