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Canada's crumbling infrastructure: the silence is deafening Add to ...

Elections should be the time to discuss the big issues. That's rarely how it works. True to form, the parties aren't talking seriously in this election about health care, climate change or Canada's role in two foreign wars.

Here's another big one that probably won't come up in Tuesday's televised leaders debate: the decrepit state of Canada's public infrastructure.

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If a major earthquake were to strike the city (and Montreal sits in an active quake zone), Canada's busiest bridge likely wouldn't last more than a few minutes. "This bridge can be expected to collapse, partially or altogether, in a significant seismic event," engineers at Delcan noted matter-of-factly in a recent report. That's not "might" or "could." The experts are pretty much saying it will.

It's hard to underplay the urgency. A replacement to the Champlain Bridge could take 15 years, or the outer lifespan of the existing bridge (cost: at least $1-billion). That's just one city, and one bridge. Across Canada, key pieces of vital public infrastructure badly need fixing or replacing. There are roads and bridges, water and sewer plants, public transit networks, parks and ports.

Here's a number to ponder: $123-billion. That's what the Canadian Federation of Municipalities estimated it would cost, four years ago, to renew aging municipal infrastructure. Roughly 60 per cent of the money is needed for transportation, water and sewage treatment.

That's just part of the story. As the country grows and expands, new demands emerge, such as transit expansions and new sewage treatment capacity (cost: $115-billion). Now we're at $238-billion and counting. And that's just for municipal infrastructure.







If there is a silver lining to this grim situation, it just might be buried in another Conference Board report. It turns out governments aren't very efficient at pricing and planning our infrastructure. We waste too much water (a Canadian uses more than the twice the water a Briton does). And we don't allocate our infrastructure very efficiently. We provide transit to ever-distant suburbs, but don't make these users pay the real cost, or even the incremental cost of expansion.



It's inevitable that Canada will have to spend a lot more on large, critical infrastructure. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper might point to his pledge of loan guarantees for Labrador's Lower Churchill hydro project. But that's for the future. It won't do anything about all the infrastructure that needs replacing now. Big challenges demand big thinking - especially at election time.

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