Conservative Government Fails Cities
Last week the Conservative Government released their Budget. Once again the Government has shown it does not understand the issues facing
Canada’s cities have been calling for a long term solution to correct the infrastructure deficit that hobbles their progress and prevents them from becoming world class economic and cultural centres that draw the best and the brightest. Instead the government has offered short term band-aid solutions.
The previous Liberal government developed the federal gas-tax transfer in order to provide a long term, predictable funding source for municipalities. The leader of the Liberal party has committed to making this transfer permanent. The government has only delivered a four year extension to this transfer. That’s not good enough.
Further, the government has continued its re-branding exercise by combining the Liberal implemented Strategic, Municipal-Rural and Border Infrastructure Funds into the renamed “Building Canada Fund”. This fund is spread over seven years, contains no new ideas and does not meet the required long-term funding that cities need. This budget gravely fails in the area of public transit. While transit projects are eligible under the gas-tax transfer and the so-called Building Canada Fund, transit projects would be in competition for these funds with all other municipal infrastructure projects. A National Transit Strategy has been called for by both the FCM Big City Mayor’s Caucus and the Canadian Urban Transit Association. The Big City Mayors have called for a specific and annual $2 billion per year investment in transit, which they feel should be:
“integrated with a predictable, permanent plan for transit that includes tax measures, research, a link to land use and transportation planning” … as well as “setting accountability targets against which to measure progress and value for money”.
Instead of a comprehensive transit strategy, this Conservative government has provided a tax credit on bus passes, which while nice, will do nothing to increase rider-ship, improve service, assist in cleaner air and less GHG emissions or provide the type of modern public transit our cities require to be competitive.
Lastly, this budget has ignored the issue of affordable housing and homelessness. The government’s refusal to address this issue doesn’t mean the problem will go away. By reducing this issue to an afterthought, lumped into a $3.3 billion fund for a variety of social issues, this government has essentially abandoned the homeless leaving cities on the hook for dealing with the problem yet again.
The budget fails Canada’s cities in several other areas ranging from the environment to policing. But most disturbing is the obvious lack of commitment to exercise smart government by partnering with the cities along with the provinces to solve these many issues which are truly of national import. Cities are where the majority of Canada’s citizens live and that number is growing yearly. Making Canada’s cities world class - magnets for the best and the brightest, centres able to maximize their economic potential and provide a superior quality of life for its citizens - requires national leadership and a vision of what this country can be. This budget and indeed this government falls short and fails our cities.
