Speech

From the Prime Minister's Web Site (http://www.pm.gc.ca/)

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PRIME MINISTER SPEAKS AT THE 70TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE FEDERATION OF CANADIAN MUNICIPALITIES

June 1, 2007
Calgary, Alberta

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Thank you.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Calgary.

Thank you for that warm welcome, and thank you, Gord, for that kind introduction.

Greetings to our host, Mayor Bronconnier, and please, ladies and gentlemen, give me a moment to acknowledge the presence of some of my colleagues from the Parliament of Canada who are here with us today. I'll call out their names. They can stand up quickly. From Calgary we have Diane Ablonczy and Art Hanger. From Edmonton we have Mike Lake and Rahim Jaffer. North part of the province, we have Blain Calkins and Rob Merrifield. And finally, the Chair of the House of Commons Natural Resources Committee, who is also the Member of Parliament for this riding, Calgary Centre, our host Lee Richardson.

To everyone who is visiting from afar, this is a rare opportunity for me to say welcome to my hometown. I've lived here more than half of my life, and I am proud to be a Calgarian, just like hundreds of others who have and continue to pour into the heart of the New West from across Canada and from around the world.

It's fitting that the theme of this year's FCM conference in Calgary is "Leading Change," because no place in Canada is experiencing as much or as rapid change as Calgary. The city crossed the 1 million population threshold last year and is continuing to welcome thousands of new citizens every month.

Calgary's GDP leaped ahead seven percent in 2006. The value of building permits jumped 32 percent. The number of head offices grew by a quarter. Employment was up almost eight percent, and as a Calgary homeowner, I'm happy to report that the average residential real estate price rose 38 percent last year.

I have to say, my wife finds this particularly reassuring given the kind of job security I have. But Calgary is not alone in its growth and prosperity. From coast to coast to coast, the Canadian economy is strong. In fact, right now Canada is on the best economic footing of any G7 country.

In Canada, we are experiencing the second longest economic expansion in the country's history, after the boom that followed the Second World War.

The national unemployment rate is at its lowest level in more than 30 years. Inflation is under control. The federal and provincial governments are all running surpluses and we're reducing the national debt. In other words, Canada's back, back as a stellar economic performer.

Canada is attracting international capital and immigrants from around the world.

And we're back as a serious player on the global stage. But most of all, you in this room are old enough – I think most of you, anyway – are old enough to remember how quickly things can turn sour. We learned some hard lessons in the last third of the 20th century. We learned that government profligacy wreaks havoc on our economy.

We know that centralizing power in Ottawa creates a fiscal imbalance and political stress for our federation.

We've learned that governments that live for today leave nasty hangovers for the governments of tomorrow. And we learned that failures at the national level can have repercussions in every community.

When Ottawa fails to plan and budget properly for transportation infrastructure, for example, what happens? We wind up with traffic gridlock on our trade corridors and in our cities.

When Ottawa uses the criminal code as a laboratory for social experiments, what happens? We wind up with rampant gun, gang and drug crime on our streets.

And when Ottawa talks and talks and talks about the environment but takes no real action to protect it, what happens? We wind up with smog-filled air and polluted land and water.

Our constituents, your constituents deserve better.

The national government must understand the genuine problems faced by working families. It must have a clear sense of purpose and priorities and it must implement a realistic, achievable plan for making our great country stronger, healthier and safer.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, that is the approach of Canada's New Government. We understand that a strong economy and a strong federal system are essential to Canada's long-term success as a country. That's why we made the restoration of fiscal balance the centrepiece of our most recent national economic plan.

For Canada to be prosperous, all the regions of the country have to be prosperous. Every province, every region, every municipality has to have it owns strengths and its own economic objectives, and Ottawa has to ensure that each has the tools and resources needed to achieve its full potential.

Our plan commits over $40 billion – that's $40 additional dollars – over the next seven years to the restoration of fiscal balance in Canada. We are putting all the major fiscal transfers from Ottawa on a stable, reliable, long-term track.

This plan is allowing us to pursue in collaboration with other levels of government and the private sector the largest infrastructure development program in half a century. Not since the great national transportation mega-projects of the post-war era has the federal government launched such a massive undertaking. This amounts to a coast-to-coast overhaul of the long neglected foundations of our economy.

The combined funding in our first two budgets provides $33 billion for investment in infrastructure over the next seven years.

This investment in infrastructure includes the gas tax fund, which will deliver $2 billion a year to municipalities and which we extended in Budget 2007 for another four more years to 2013.

This $33 billion also includes the GST rebate to municipalities, which will rise to nearly a billion dollars a year over the next seven years because in Budget 2007, we increased the rebate from 57 percent to 100 percent.

And it includes major investment in the roads, highways and airports of the North, picking up where John Diefenbaker left off with his visionary Roads to Resources program.

There are a few Northerners here. Altogether annual federal support for provincial, territorial and municipal infrastructure will grow from $4.3 billion this year to $5.7 billion by 2013-14.

This is the largest such investment in Canada's history. It will provide the kind of stable, predictable funding you have long wanted and needed, and it will help plan for and sustain the kind of economic and population growth that is happening here in Calgary and across the country.

In short, this historic investment is all about building a stronger Canada.

This will revitalize the country's economic infrastructure. Our roads, our highways, our airports and ports, our bridges and our border crossings. And this will enhance our communities' quality of life. Our public transit, our cultural facilities and our sewer and water supply systems.

Every part of Canada will benefit from our infrastructure investments. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, key projects include things like the St. John Harbour cleanup.

Highway 30 which bypasses the Island of Montreal.

The Flow Project to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality in the Greater Toronto Area. The expansion of the Red River floodway to protect Winnipeg, and the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative which will tie Canada into the booming Far East through our West Coast ports.

Now, as you can see, ladies and gentlemen, from this short list, many of our infrastructure investments have a twofold target: the economy and the environment. We are building a stronger and a healthier Canada.

That means a stronger economy and a healthier environment, because in our view, the two are inseparable. Over time, an economy financed by environmental degradation will destroy itself, yet in the short term, support for environmental measures will collapse if they threaten jobs and standards of living, so we must balance consumption with conservation, especially in an economy like Canada's which depends so heavily on energy and natural resource development.

This spring our government put forward the most ambitious plan in Canadian history to control and reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

For the first time, we will be putting mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants.

Through mandatory national emissions targets, our goal is to cut industrial air pollution in half by the year 2015, and starting this year, industrial plants will have to begin dramatically reducing their GHG output per unit of production.

This will put us on a path to reduce Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and up to 70 percent by 2050. It is a responsible, achievable strategy that balances tough action on the environment with continuing economic growth and incentives to develop new technology.

To be sure, it's not the only instrument we'll be using to fight air pollution and climate change.

Through initiatives like the ecoENERGY Program and the Trust Fund for Climate Change, we will increase our reserves of clean, renewable energy, encourage energy conservation, and fund research on green energy technologies.

And we'll find cleaner ways to develop our resources industry, like CO2 capture and clean coal.

Is there a cost to doing all of this? The truth of the matter: there is, and that cost will be significant.

The regulation of industry will drive up their production costs, and some of these costs will ultimately be felt by our consumers, and more of the taxes Canadians pay every year will be dedicated to environmental protection and improvement.

But Canadians have made it very clear: they're fed up with empty rhetoric and they want action, and ladies and gentlemen, the era of voluntary compliance in this country is over.

Of course this is not our only environmental initiative. We will be bringing in new measures to promote clean air, clean soil and clean water.

You will also be particularly interested, among our other environmental initiatives, in our significant investment in the Nature Conservancy of Canada. This initiative will help bank environmentally sensitive lands from one end of the country to the other, especially in urban areas and near protected parkland.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, as you know, polls indicate the environment is today's number one issue. Unlike some of my colleagues, I recognize it's not the only issue. Besides a stronger Canada and a healthier Canada, we want to build a safer Canada, and for many of your constituents and mine, crime is a significant and growing concern.

The vast majority of Canadians are upstanding, civilized, law-abiding citizens. They work hard, they look after their families, pay their taxes and participate in their communities, and they're unhappy when others flout the rules and choose to live outside the law. And they're even more unhappy when their governments do nothing.

Crime rates in Canada are far too high.

Too many Canadians have been victimized by crime, and there are too many neighbourhoods where it's increasingly not safe to walk the street at night. Guns, gangs and drugs are the common denominators.

Our government has taken action with no fewer than 11 crime bills.

Last December, we passed the first one of these into law. It made street racing a criminal offence and created stiff penalties for racers who injure innocent bystanders. But still crawling their way through Parliament are other laws that have the support of governments and constituents at all levels.

For example, mandatory prison sentences for crimes committed with firearms, reverse onus for those on bail for those who commit crimes with guns, a higher age of protection to deter sexual predators who prey on the young, provisions to keep the country's most dangerous, repeat and violent offenders behind bars permanently, and new tools to allow the police to catch drivers under the influence of narcotics.

Some of these important bills have been blocked by the Opposition. So I urge you to press all Parliamentarians to pass these bills. We cannot let partisan wrangling get in the way of safe streets and safe communities.

That's why we're also investing in a new national anti-drug strategy, why we're boosting the resources of the RCMP, and consulting with the provinces and territories on plans to enable the hiring of 2500 new frontline police officers in communities across Canada.

Ladies and gentlemen, what do all of our initiatives on infrastructure, the environment and crime add up to?

A government with a purpose and a plan for a stronger, healthier, safer Canada, a Canada which you, in all your communities throughout the country, are helping to build. This is what we want. It's what you want. It's what our citizens want.

As the spring session of Parliament winds down, we're pushing very hard to get our budget and our crime bills passed, and to get our new environmental regulations in place so we can start rebuilding our national infrastructure, cleaning up our air, water and land and making our streets safer for families and children.

It's an ambitious agenda, but it's also a focused agenda and a doable agenda, and in closing, I'd like to thank all of you for the work that you similarly do, one neighbourhood at a time, for our communities across this great country, responding to social needs, encouraging business development, beautifying our public spaces.

Canadian communities are wellsprings of opportunity for people not just here, but around the world, in no small part because of the efforts that you make.

And working together, I know we can continue to build a country that's recognized as the best place on earth to find a job and raise a family, a country that's built from the ground up with good services in return for reasonable taxes, a country that works for all of us, a stronger, healthier and safer Canada.

Thank you, and God bless Canada.

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The Prime Minister's Office - Communications
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