Today Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a speech in Cambridge, Ontario-a quarterly update on his government’s Economic Action Plan.
“Today, I am here to announce that only 10 weeks into this fiscal year, fully 80 percent of our plan’s funding has been committed and is being implemented across this country,” said Harper.
Harper said planning, development and execution of infrastructure projects has been “dramatically accelerated” and the result is that about 3,000 projects across the country are now underway. “No small feat only 72 days into a new fiscal year.”
He named a lot of the projects we plotted on our stimulus map in our March/April issue–including British Columbia’s Evergreen Line and Quebec’s Champlain Bridge–that are well into tendering, design and engineering work.
Harper added, “Hundreds of smaller projects are already well underway, putting Canadian electricians, plumbers, roofers, lighting technicians, flooring contractors, and labourers back to work.”
Liberal finance critic John McCallum told CP on Wednesday, before the report’s release, that he expects it to be a “smokescreen” masking government inaction, citing a complaint by big cities mayors last week that they have yet to see federal infrastructure funds.
Not according to Harper, who said, “This represents the largest infrastructure renewal effort in this country in over half a century.”
June 16th, 2009 at 3:36 am
Look for our analysis of Harper’s report in our upcoming July/August issue. All the municipalities looking for funding may want to think about operations and maintenance costs of the new infrastructure they’ll be building.