Since Ottawa announced the best way to fight the global recession was to spend money, countless municipalities have benefited from stimulus funding that has been used to renew important community infrastructure. Now that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said the money tap is about to be turned off, it’s not surprising towns and cities are a little concerned.
Harper recently told the Federation of Canadian Municipalities meeting in Toronto that the two-year-old infrastructure stimulus program will end next March. While saying the thousands of infrastructure projects helped propel this country’s economic recovery, Harper said municipal units can’t expect to live on stimulus forever.
The $43 billion program must end, he said, to allow the federal government to begin reducing the deficit. Continuing to pour money into various project from one end of the country to the other succeeded in putting people to work, but it has to have a big impact on the nation’s financial bottom line.
On the flip side, municipal leaders feel it shouldn’t take a global economic crisis for towns and cities to get the help they need to repair and renew the infrastructure they feel is so important.
As the Economic Action Plan comes to a close, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is calling on Ottawa to enter into a new partnership and instead of turning off the infrastructure taps completely mayors and wardens are hoping those projects still playing the waiting game won’t come to an abrupt end next March when Ottawa retightens its fiscal belt.
The municipal federation does have a point in that stimulus money is creating thousands of jobs across Canada. Unfortunately, as valuable as these infrastructure projects are they cost huge sums of money. If Ottawa were to make a politically-expedient decision to renew the stimulus spending we as Canadians must be prepared for the fallout that would come in even higher taxes and fewer federal programs and services because the reality is that money truly doesn’t grow on trees.
