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Bill 204 – Provincial-Municipal Tax Sharing Act

Ms Blakeman: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I was very pleased to welcome the participation of those that did participate, including the minister and the members for Calgary-Egmont and Red Deer South. It was a very interesting exercise to shine the light on how well government members understand municipal funding and the current situation that many of the municipalities believe that they find themselves in. It was an excellent opportunity for me to start and in some cases continue a dialogue with the many fine municipalities in Alberta. That was a real opportunity for me, and I enjoyed it very much. I did correspond with several dozen municipalities, and I’m very grateful for that.

Just let me talk very briefly about the MSI funding, which I think every single member referenced. I set out to create a funding stream for municipalities that would be stable, predictable, and would not come with any strings attached, and this government is very fond of putting strings on any money that they give out, including the MSI funding. The MSI funding is time limited. It’s a 10-year program, which we’re several years into, and it is focused on capital and infrastructure funding. The history of it came out of the tremendous infrastructure debt that the province created on behalf of the municipalities and left the municipalities to deal with. Those from Calgary will appreciate that history because it was their mayor who was most instrumental and very aggressive in pursuing the provincial government to come up with some funding money to be able to address that infrastructure debt. I think at one point the infrastructure debt in the province was estimated to be somewhere in the $8 billion mark – I’m sorry; there might be a zero on the end of that – so there was a lot to catch up on, and that’s what that fund was meant to do, and it is doing it.

There was a very small component in that, I think about $50 million, that was available for operating money. In fact, by the time you divided that up amongst the municipalities, it was such a small amount of money that it was not going to make a significant difference in any one operating allocation for a given year, and it may have prevented their being able to complete some capital programs, so as the minister indicated, it all went to capital. Bill 204 was anticipating a fund of money that was directed only to operating money, no capital money, so MSI and what I was proposing in Bill 204 did not intersect. Bill 204 was – one more time I’ll say it – intended for operating funding.

The minister worried about accountability, and I find that interesting. I take his point, but I think there are a number of accountability and auditing functions already in place there, as you would expect. Certainly, the government funds are audited as they go out. The municipalities are also audited, so the money as it comes into the municipalities is audited. We also have a legislative review that was built into the act. So there’s quite a bit of accountability that is available there, more, in fact, than you sometimes see with other government programs.

It was meant to be a piece of legislation that dealt with the most pressing matter before the municipalities, and that was the operating gap that they were experiencing. So, no, I didn’t get into a lot of other things, and I didn’t make it really complicated. [interjection] I was trying to address one thing, and I just did address it. The Minister of Health appears to have missed his opportunity to speak, but I’m happy to talk with him afterwards. [interjection] Well, he’s very exercised about it, whatever it is, but I’m sure he’ll let me know afterwards.

It was my intention that the monies be distributed on a per capita basis, but I did not write that into the legislation at the time because if the legislation passed, I wanted there to be an additional debate on the best way – and that discussion should take place primarily with the municipalities – for that money to be distributed.

The Member for Calgary-Egmont talked about how the government provides 80 grants, but he includes in that things like lottery grant funding and, in fact, the federal government grants.

I encourage people to support Bill 204. It’s a great move for our municipalities.