Modeling Journey

Let's hope that Gerard Kennedy manages to persuade a majority of the caucus to go along with his proposed sharper focus for stimulus infrastructure spending.

Kennedy is recommending to his fellow Liberals the targeting of two major objectives with infrastructure spending, together with tighter control and easier access by municipalities:

"While collecting his data, Kennedy has been thinking about what kind of infrastructure policy the Liberals should take into the next election.

He can't speak in specifics because he hasn't presented his proposals to the party, but he outlined some of his priorities in an interview last week.

He believes federal infrastructure funding should serve two primary purposes: to make Canada's cities more sustainable and to renew the quality of life in northern and remote communities.

This would make Ottawa less open to proposals to widen highways and accelerate road-building in urban areas and more open to proposals to find new uses for public buildings in towns struggling with depopulation.

He thinks the gas tax fund, through which Ottawa transfers a portion of its gasoline tax revenue to the municipalities, should be the principal vehicle for distributing infrastructure money.

The Conservatives did add $1 billion to the fund in January's budget, but Kennedy would like to have seen most of Ottawa's infrastructure funding delivered that way. As well as being more efficient, he points out, gas tax transfers allow municipalities to use federal money intelligently, rather than coming up with hasty proposals to take advantage of on-again, off-again infrastructure programs.

He would like to break the link between infrastructure spending and political pork barrelling.

It is hard to blame Canadians for being cynical, Kennedy admits. For generations, politicians have used capital projects to reward their friends and pay back voters who supported them. "We need to convince Canadians we can use their money to make their lives better.""

Now if the Coalition was in power, the infrastructure stimulus would have been far more tightly focused, and better administered.

Compare Kennedy's targets to the wasteful home renovation stimulus funds which the Harper crew came up with.

Harper and his Tories are aiming at getting personal political bang for the money spent, and not at making taxpayer's hard earned money being well spent on meaningful projects, such as the two outlined by Kennedy in his initial plans.