Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole is promising to scrap the Liberal government’s infrastructure bank and ensure every Canadian has high-speed internet by 2025.

Getting more shovels in the ground on massive public projects is one way he’s pledged to recover Canada’s economy from the COVID-19 pandemic.

O’Toole criticized the Liberal government for sitting on billions of dollars in what he called the “failed” Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was established after Justin Trudeau’s win in 2015 to attract private dollars for public projects.

“Unlike the Liberals, we won’t condition funding so narrowly, to whether the project can be described as ‘green infrastructure,”‘ he told reporters on Wednesday from his party’s downtown Ottawa broadcast studio.

The Conservative leader vowed to immediately dedicate the existing money to infrastructure that is ready to build and give cities and First Nations better access to federal infrastructure funding by cutting down on red tape.

O’Toole also promised that a Tory government would build the digital infrastructure needed to give all of Canada high-speed internet within four years.

The promises are the latest to be touted in the Conservative election platform that O’Toole rolled out on the first full day of the campaign, and which the Liberals attacked for not yet being costed.

“We’ve submitted our platform to the parliamentary budget officer as soon as we could,” O’Toole said. “We will update Canada’s Recovery Plan when the PBO gives us the confirmation back.”

O’Toole repeated his promise to balance the budget within a decade — without making cuts — by reining in federal spending and achieving his party’s goal of growing the economy by three per cent each year. Annual gross domestic product has leaped by that percentage only once since 2011.

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