Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Beauséjour for his supportive words.

The first thing I would like to say is that it is almost unbelievable that, since 2006, this Prime Minister has not attended an official meeting of premiers. That is contrary to what previous prime ministers of Canada have done. They all wanted to hold such meetings in order to run the federation. It is very simple. Canada is a very decentralized country and we must work together in order to run it.

If we look at the jurisdictions, we see there are very few areas, apart from monetary policy and to some extent foreign affairs and defence, that are purely federal. Virtually everything else is a joint jurisdiction in one way or another, or else provincial, so if one wants to achieve things that are important to the people of Canada, there is no choice but for the levels of government to work together.

In this regard I would like to give a quote from Kathleen Wynne, the premier of my province of Ontario. Just a few days ago she said:

Fifty years ago, Lester Pearson, John Robarts and Jean Lesage and their contemporaries helped build a Social Union that strengthened our federation and bound us closer together. Today, our generation needs to take inspiration from that as we work in co-operation to build a better Economic Union for all Canadians. We know that when we are investing in infrastructure we are building, and when we are building roads and transit, or hospitals and schools, or energy networks and ports, we are growing.

That is the vision from the Premier of Ontario, and I agree with it. I would not expect the current Prime Minister to go that far, as he seems to have a history of not totally agreeing with Kathleen Wynne, but at least he should have meetings to effectively run the federation.

Let me begin by thinking of two reasons that he perhaps does not want to do that and then go on to think of some areas that are particularly important for my province and for my premier.

I think the first reason he is averse to such meetings is that he has a very strong ideology, which could be called a constitution in watertight departments. He sees things in black and white. Health care belongs to provinces, so why meet provinces? It is their area.

If we go through the list, everything is in watertight compartments. He somehow thinks that he can run his jurisdictions independently from provinces, and vice versa. However, in the complex world in which we live, that is an unrealistic proposition, because in virtually all areas we have overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping interests.

The second reason is that for our Prime Minister, the concept of partners is somewhat alien. He likes to decide things himself, but in order to run the federation one has to be collaborative. There has to be an atmosphere of give and take. There have to be negotiations, sometimes messy, and this is not an environment that our Prime Minister relishes. As a consequence, the country is losing a great deal.

Let me just illustrate a few areas. I will begin with infrastructure and pensions, which have been of critical importance to Premier Kathleen Wynne and to the people of Ontario.

Kathleen Wynne, somewhat unexpectedly, won a majority government after going to the people with two major propositions. One was an expanded role for infrastructure and the other was a made-in-Ontario version of an expanded Canada pension plan.

On the first point, I live in the greater Toronto area, where traffic gridlock has become worse and worse. A major part of the Ontario platform was the idea of focusing a lot of resources in this area of infrastructure. As we heard in question period today from the member for Trinity Spadina, cities like Sydney, Nova Scotia—and I think he mentioned Regina, and others—are waiting, with nothing happening from the federal government.

The federal government has back-end-loaded its funding to such an extent that we have a 90% drop in actual funding in upcoming years, so the infrastructure program, which is so critical to Ontario, so critical to Canada, so critical to jobs and growth, is floundering. This is one area where I think a partnership is needed, involving not just the federal and provincial governments but also municipal governments, which, while they have just 8% of total revenues, have approximately half of all the country's infrastructure. Here is one area that calling out and pleading for co-operation across governments to get a program befitting the needs of our country to deal with the massive infrastructure deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is an area in which the government has not acted.

A second area crying out for federal-provincial co-operation—not just meetings for the sake of meetings, but active co-operation—is pensions.

Some months ago the provincial governments and the federal government were having a series of meetings, and they appeared to be heading towards a consensus on a moderate expansion of the Canada pension plan on the grounds that Canadians today are not saving enough to live comfortably in their retirement years. That, whether the government likes it or not, is inherently federal-provincial, because any change in the CPP requires the agreement of both the federal government and a majority of the provinces.

However, the government simply vetoed any change in the Canada pension plan, abandoned the meetings, and left the provinces to their own devices. I think this was an extraordinarily short-sighted move that was detrimental to the well-being of future Canadians in their retirement years, but that issue was one of the election platforms of Kathleen Wynne. She won the election apparently on the basis of developing a made-in-Ontario version of an expanded CPP, which her government is now working on. I think she has given up on the current government on this issue and is hoping that our party might win the election, in which case we have committed to move forward with an expanded Canada pension plan.

Those are two main areas on which the Ontario party of Kathleen Wynne just recently won a majority government. Infrastructure and pensions are two areas that have suffered not from benign neglect but from malignant neglect, if you will, by the federal government, which is not helping out in either of these areas.

Another area is environment. Where there is a void, other governments will occupy that void. For many years the federal government has done very, very little on the environment and greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that we continue to get these fossil prizes at international conferences. The provinces have stepped into the void, setting up their own systems of cap and trade or carbon taxes to fill the void that the federal government has vacated.

Here is an example of a total lack of leadership, co-operation, or federal-provincial meetings on the environment. The provinces have stepped up to the plate and acted when no action was coming from the federal government, so at least that is better than nothing.

Another example is pipelines. This should be the forte, the strong point, of this federal government, because it has always thought of Canada as a super energy power and put all its eggs in the energy basket. If there is one thing we would think the government would be able to deliver on, it is pipelines to get all of that oil to market. However, the Conservatives have failed so far on pipelines in all three directions. On pipelines to the south, they have failed to get the agreement of the United States. On pipelines to the west, the northern gateway remains bogged down, partly through a lack of federal leadership on environmental and aboriginal issues. Now the pipeline to the east is also running into problems.

We have seen the premiers of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec get together to discuss a national energy approach, and the federal government has again been notable in its absence. Again the provinces are working together without any significant involvement by the federal government to devise a national energy strategy. Clearly that initiative is floundering today, not just because of the price of oil but primarily because of the inability of the federal government to work with provincial governments to find a solution to the pipeline issue and to resolve those questions of environmental and aboriginal concern.

I could go on with other issues, but there is the list of flagrant derelictions of duty on the part of the federal government in failing to work with its provincial and municipal counterparts.

John McCallum

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