Closing the Gap: Canada’s Infrastructure Deficit

Canada wants to be better. We want a higher standard of living for all of us across the country. But we are not building the infrastructure. We need to be the Canada we want to be. In fact, we don’t even know what’s needed. Infrastructure links us with the places and people that matter to us, from roads and transit to energy, water and internet. It connects us, our homes and our workplaces. Civic infrastructures like schools, hospitals and community centers anchor us and help ensure our prosperity. Communication networks and supply chains make our economy competitive on a global scale. But there is a gap between the infrastructure we have and what we need to grow. In the 1950s, Canada invested over 3% of our GDP into infrastructure. But for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, spending was half that, not even enough to maintain our existing assets. Today we’re lacking affordable homes, schools and health care facilities for everyone. Some of the infrastructure we’ve built our country on is stretched to the breaking point. We need to make strategic decisions informed by data and evidence, not the latest political wins or crises. Other countries are far ahead of us. The UK and Australia deliver national infrastructure assessments every five years, which identify and prioritize major infrastructure investments. New Zealand has a fully transparent public pipeline of infrastructure projects over the next 30 years. The United States is reinvesting over $1 trillion in its transportation, water and communication networks and making sure that they are resilient to climate change and equitable for communities at the same time. Canada can do better than ad hoc spending to fill in the gaps. We need to systematically collect more information about what we need, where and when, so we can make well-informed choices about where to stand and bring the private sector, governments and communities together to build the country we want in the future.

Karen Chapple Good morning. I’m Karen Chappell, director of the School Cities and professor of geography and planning at the University of Toronto. And indeed, we have a gap between the future we want and the infrastructure we see falling apart in front of our eyes. And what is so frustrating is that we have no policy coherence. Thank you, Don Iveson, for the term – we have no policy coherence around infrastructure in Canada. And it’s not rocket science. Other countries are empowering national infrastructure commissions that make plans and place real accountability on jurisdictions for implementation. With funding behind it. They mandate coordination across orders of government. They’re not just advisory commissions. I hope Sean Fraser is listening. This is exactly the kind of problem the School of Cities likes to address by co-creating multi-disciplinary research and solutions with Canada’s communities and its great universities. So we partnered with CUI. Together we issued a call for proposals and we brought on 46 researchers at 18 great Canadian universities and institutions. You can access the report here or on our website. The QR code is also on your table. Here’s what we learned. We start by asking what is amis in Canada? Just as our urban population took off, fueled by immigration, we stopped spending on infrastructure. We’re spending more now, but still without real planning and coordination across multiple orders of government. A lot of infrastructure is invisible until it breaks, like we just learned in Calgary. But infrastructure is not just about providing services. It’s also about supporting the collective. It’s about enabling participation in democracy. And perhaps most important, in a time of growing polarization, restoring trust in government. So let’s look at the specific articles in our report. A team of researchers at Metrolinx, U of T and McGill analyzes the issue of cost overruns in transit system construction. They show how costs in Canada have escalated relative to Asia and Europe. And that’s in green on the chart, the Asian and European countries. So the punchline, it’s all about the soft costs, professional services, contingencies and escalations. That’s what … That’s what means that Canada gets a raw deal. We could learn a lot about project planning and cost estimation from other countries. A team from U of T analyzes greenhouse gas emissions from water infrastructure. They identify the benefits of denser urban form because of the embodied carbon in water infrastructure a low density place like Trois River is emitting a lot more than Vancouver, a high density place. From U of T, Waterloo, Simon Fraser and … Research looks at uneven access to employment and amenities across different groups. For Indigenous groups, here shown in green, whether they’re walking, whether they’re biking or taking public transit, it takes longer to get to destinations. From U of T and McMaster we see how cuts in transit since the pandemic disproportionately affect low income groups. Accessibility has gotten much worse in Calgary and Ottawa. That’s red. Red means bad accessibility, blue means good. Edmonton and Vancouver have actually improved. Biking infrastructure brings critical health benefits, and yet access to protected bike lanes is uneven. As a team from University of Saskatchewan, Montreal, Simon Fraser and Interact shows us the green areas here are where racialized groups have good bike infrastructure and then yellow is where they don’t. Vancouver does much better than Montreal, by the way, in this regard. A team from Dalhousie and Memorial shows us that cities like Halifax often have inadequate community spaces to welcome newcomers. The yellow dots here are community centers and they’re concentrated in the areas in lightest green, which are the ones with the lowest share of immigrants. Two papers in our volume show how the housing crisis has amplified existing infrastructure challenges in the North. Researchers from Memorial and Queen’s Universities highlight the disconnect between Northern housing policy and immigration policy. In Yellowknife, new PRs are settling in just as housing starts are tanking. A team from University of Calgary and Taylor Architecture show how in the absence of social housing, we need to diversify our housing models, following models put forward by indigenous led organizations. We often forget that media is part of our civic infrastructure. If any of you caught Joseph Stiglitz visit to Canada last week, he argued that CBC helps us anchor democracy in Canada. But equally as important is community media, which is plentiful in some cities and not so much in others. This U of T study shows that community media ensures access to trustworthy information and empowers local communities to dispute misinformation and to participate in civic discussions. Researchers from UBC and U of T talk about the challenge of data infrastructure where we can’t get the data about public lands to leverage housing development. In the case of Ontario, the municipalities in yellow and pink here, they didn’t fully cooperate with the requests for public land data. Are you guys here in the room? A fascinating paper by law professors at the University of Quebec, Montreal and University of Ottawa talks about the growing use of preemption or greater provincial control. This has worked really well in California, by the way, to get affordable housing built. But it seems that the motives are not quite so noble. Bill 329 allows the Nova Scotia Housing Minister to bypass the Halifax Regional Municipality to speed up development. Bill 20, in Alberta allows the province to force municipalities to repeal their own bylaws. Ontario penalizes cities that don’t meet their housing targets. So the concern here, and I’m a believer in preemption in certain instances like for affordable housing, but the concern here is twofold. First, are provinces squelching municipal innovation as they do this? And will this really result in more affordable housing? So that’s the last paper of our set, but it’s not the end of our work. There’s so much more research to be done on libraries and schools and parks and roads, on the arts and much more. And Canada needs to matter more. We need to be more competitive and diverse by strengthening mineral production and digital and life sciences and other sectors. We need to continue to welcome immigrants. We need to prepare for an uncertain climate. None of this will happen without planning and building infrastructure based on evidence, with transparency in the prioritization process and real funding and power for municipalities at the table with provinces and the feds. There is simply no time to waste, people. Thank you.