Thanks, Mr. Chair, and thanks to the Minister. I look forward to getting the recalculation of the municipal funding gap to update the 2014 calculations. That will be great. I have got a couple of suggestions for him in terms of what that strategy should contain.
There should be, in my view, an annual update of that gap, and it should be made available. The Minister might want to table a report in the House or something about the progress that is made towards that gap on an annual basis. It is going to require a pretty sophisticated tracking system. You have already got the asset side of it down, but the money coming in. Some of this could be, and the Minister has alluded to this, made up by the federal government through some of its infrastructure funding programs. You are going to need to have a more sophisticated system to track the incoming money and how it is helping you to reduce this gap.
The last point I guess I want to make is that we have got to make sure that the MACA Minister gets to the table at Cabinet to make sure that more of the federal infrastructure funding actually goes to the communities instead of building roads. That is what it has got to come down to. Are we going to put our communities over building roads? It is that simple in my mind. The big mega projects that Cabinet keeps pushing are taking money away from our communities, quite frankly, and that is what it comes down to.
I want to urge the Minister, and I am glad the other Cabinet Members are here to hear me say this because I make the same point on housing all of the time, we have got to meet the needs of our people, and that has to come over the mega projects that Cabinet keeps pushing.
I look forward to the Minister's response on this. Thanks, Mr. Chair.