Prime Minister Paul Martin is advising patience on the issue of giving Canada's financially-strapped cities a portion of the federal gas tax.

CTV.ca News Staff

Prime Minister Paul Martin is advising patience on the issue of giving Canada's financially-strapped cities a portion of the federal gas tax.

"We're very, very tight. The government's budgets are very, very tight," Martin said Saturday in Edmonton.

"And so, quite clearly, what we're going to have to do - and this has always been understood - is we're going to have to look towards a ramping up of what ever the mechanisms that we put in place are ..."

However, he did say the gas tax - which raised $4.5 billion annually for the federal coffers - will be a good way to get stable, predictable funding to Canada's cities. He didn't say what proportion of that $4.5 billion the cities should get.

The mayors of Edmonton and Calgary were pleased to hear Martin say funding of cities was a priority for him.

"It certainly leaves me with the feeling that the commitment and requirement to keep the cities sustainable is on the government's agenda," Edmonton's Bill Smith told The Canadian Press.

Dave Bronconnier, Calgary's mayor, said he expected to see Martin's words backed up in the upcoming federal budget, saying there was no reason this item couldn't be fast-tracked.

John Godfrey, the prime minister's Parliamentary secretary, said it was unlikely the gas tax revenue would start with the federal budget expected later this winter. He did hint, however, some other assistance might be possible.

Canada's big-city mayors are to meet in Toronto this Thursday to discuss a new way to fund cities.

Cities get the bulk of their revenue from property taxes. Mike Harcourt, a former Vancouver mayor and B.C. premier who is chairing a committee for Martin on municipal funding, said that is no longer enough.

This was the second day of Martin's first trip to Western Canada as prime minister. He has been officially on the job for just over a month.

Besides meeting with mayors, he met with farmers, ranchers and related officials in Saskatchewan to give them a briefing on his discussions with U.S. President George Bush earlier this week about resuming cross-border trade in live cattle.

That trade has been at a standstill since late May, when a cow with mad cow disease was found on an Alberta farm.

The situation has been complicated by the discovery of an infected cow on a Washington state dairy farm in late December - a cow that was born in Alberta.

CTV's Jeff Little told CTV Newsnet that Martin seems to be riding a wave of popularity in the West.

Reducing Western alienation has been described as a priority by Martin.

Farmers seem to think Martin is doing what he can on the mad cow file.

"They're (Martin and Agriculture Minister Bob Speller) communicating with those who make the decisions and, in return, are communicating with the industry, and that's all people here seem to have asked for."

CTV's Jeff Little contributed to this report.