Infrastructure for Growth: Fuelling Local Economies

Diane Therrien-Hale What a fabulous event so far. Thank you so much to the Canadian Urban Institute and team for bringing us all together and also shout out to all the staff here at the National Arts Center for ensuring things run smoothly and keeping us hydrated and caffeinated. We appreciate you. I’m very honored to be moderating this panel on Economic strength and Infrastructure for Growth: Fueling Local Economies. But the definition of economic strength and infrastructure can vary. Hard infrastructure, soft civic infrastructure and as we just heard, Canada’s infrastructure deficit is a pressing challenge for communities across the country. City budgets are often constrained by many factors like lack of revenue tools, tax weariness from the public, and often shortsighted approach to planning and investment because of relatively short terms of council. So there’s all kinds of things going on. So I’m just going to start with one question to each panelist, and then we’re going to kind of move on to a more broad question. So, Matti, can you talk to us a little bit about your research and what you see as major trends in planning and financing for public infrastructure? And what are some of the considerations that you’re thinking about in terms of economic strength? And what kind of parameters are you using when defining that?

Matti Siemiatycki Thanks and good morning, everyone. It’s great to see you all. One of the things that occurs to me listening this morning is infrastructure has the qualities of a magic term. We all we use it very generally, but we use it because it makes you sound smart and it makes you sound responsible. And it seems like for politicians and officials, they just want to keep saying it over and over again. We’re going to invest in infrastructure. We’re going to invest in infrastructure. We’re going to invest in infrastructure. And I think what we sometimes find is we don’t really know what that means. The definitions behind that are somewhat vague, and certainly how they’re going to pay for it is often left very much unsaid. Now, when it comes to economic infrastructure, we often … what comes to mind most readily is pipes and sewers and roads. And that’s certainly the economic engine. But we’ve expanded, increasingly expanded, the definition of infrastructure to include social infrastructure. So the schools and the libraries and the rec centers, which are critically important to how our communities work. In fact, just recently we did a study with the United Way of Greater Toronto just showing how uneven the social infrastructure is. All of the social services and all of their spaces that are also aging and becoming harder to have access to. Then there’s green infrastructure and all the ways that the natural systems feed into our cities and the parks that have become a real flashpoint around encampments and around the quality of services in those spaces, that green infrastructure is equally important. And finally, you’re starting to hear people talk about care infrastructure, that it’s not just physical. But many of the care services like our health care system and our schools, also have an infrastructural component to them. And all of this is tied together with our economic prosperity. And I think this is really the discussions that we’ve been having over the last few hours.

Diane Therrien-Hale Absolutely. Yeah. And that ties in, green infrastructure, these things tie into Steve at the Canada Infrastructure Bank, which was a very innovative project when it started 6 or 7 years ago now, time flies. But what are some of the innovative projects that you’ve seen come through the CIB and helped to bring to fruition and how they’ve helped drive local growth, accelerating and enabling infrastructure for housing and supporting communities, including indigenous communities? Because I know you do a lot of work on that front. So can you talk to us about some of those successes and any challenges that municipalities or First Nations should know about?

Steve Robins Well, I think the thing that’s really unique about infrastructure and I’m probably talking about the hard infrastructure more than some of the soft infrastructure, and that’s largely what we finance is the fact that it’s so long lasting. And that means it’s both a bet on the future of what our societies will look like and an active decision to shape what the cities of the next decades will look like for urban residents, for Canadians as a whole. And what that means is that there’s real risks when you’re making a decision to go invest in infrastructure. And one of the challenges that we’re seeing with municipalities, but also with First Nations communities across the country, is how do you build the infrastructure in response to some of the population growth that we just talked about in the previous keynote that Karen talked about … The sewers, the pipes, the water, the upgrades to the electricity infrastructure to both decarbonize those grids, but to support home electrification, electric vehicles, affordable and industrial development. How do you get that infrastructure in place in time so that that’s not a bottleneck on economic growth? And the CIBs a really unique tool there because we have products that help share in the risks of how that economic growth and how that development materializes. So we’re working with municipalities currently in Manitoba with Brandon, with … municipalities too provide a product that says, let’s go build the water and wastewater infrastructure that you need to respond to the massive population pressures that you’re experiencing. And we put the water and wastewater in first so that the communities and people can follow and buy homes and home developers can come in and we’re not sure how long that that development will take. And we’ll share in the risk of how long it will take and allows a mayor and a council to move faster on getting the infrastructure built. We do the same thing with First Nations communities. I was in Saskatoon last week with one of our partners at Kahkewistahaw Landing, where they’ve got a parcel of land right next to Saskatoon Airport that hasn’t been developed for decades. And how the CIBs financing tools can come in at no cost to government and say, here’s a financing product that will share in the risk of how long this development will take to help build an economic development opportunity, a housing opportunity, a community services opportunity right in Saskatoon.

Diane Therrien-Hale Awesome. Thank you. So there’s also growing trends which will be continued to be hastened by a changing climate, which we’ve heard a little bit about, to support local economies and build resiliency at the micro local community level. And so, Zita, you are obviously intimately familiar with this type of approach. Can you briefly share for some who aren’t aware about Shorefast and then also talk about recommendations or advice that you have for those of us across Canada who are looking for ways to really support or build out our local communities in this age of climate crisis. And also all the, you know, in lieu of all the global, you know, fiascos going on.

Zita Cobb You mean the giant hairball? Yeah. There’s a book called Navigating the Giant Hairball. Let’s talk about Canada for a minute. Canada is made up of 4434 incorporated communities. And heavens knows how many that are not incorporated. And we … I’ve been trying to think of a positive way to say this, Canada is much less than the sum of its parts. So maybe that’s the opportunity. Imagine if we could even only be the sum of our parts. And I think the hardest thing for us to accept as Canadians is who we are. We’re in a constant fight with who we are. We want to be somebody else, it seems, because we are all these communities spread over this vast geography. And what we have to figure out, and it’s a delicious problem, is how to be masters of all scales. And what I have learned working on an island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, after a business career, thinking I know how to do this. Community economic development is the hardest thing anybody could ever take on because the management of place does not align with the management of institutions. And I think as a country, we have a lot of institutions that are not an appropriate scale for the scale of the problems we’re trying to solve. And so place management is a different kind of challenge. And someone on a panel this morning said, “what systems? They’re silos. They’re not systems.” And so I think that’s the opportunity we have. If we can figure out how to get … what is the problem we’re trying to solve. I think the problem we’re trying to solve is economic momentum for more people in more places. And if we want to talk about – infrastructure is one of these words I try not to use because I don’t know what it means, but I think it means what do embodied, social, meaning-seeking creatures need? That might get us there. And then what we need to figure out how to do is knit a country. Janice was saying last night, when we were talking about air access, how do you knit a country? Well, when the first time we tried to knit a country, we built a railroad. But now to knit a country is like – think about infrastructure as the connections among and between all these lovely, amazing assets called places. And that’s everything from air access, including regional air access. It’s finance that actually service country we are not the country we want to be. We don’t have that but that’s the opportunity to build. That’s the infrastructure.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Thank you for that. So, Carol, as the only city architect in the country that we know of, can you explain the importance of architecture as infrastructure? And again, I think infrastructure is one of those things that can mean a million different things to different people. But it’s … But how has Edmonton’s focus on great architecture helped the community? Because it’s an example of a tangible building that then has intangible value. And I think you can talk a little bit about what that looks like.

Carol Belanger Thank you so much. Yeah. And it’s definitely a position I would love to see franchised to other cities because I sort of see myself as an educated buyer for the citizens of Edmonton in terms of professional services for architecture and for open spaces. And it’s been an amazing job. I love it. But the part of, you know, our city building is really when you look at it, it’s not just serving the purpose, but it’s also that part of architecture that can be aspirational or beautiful. And I know it sounds weird to just talk about beauty, but I mean, we talk about mental health. Well, being in a place that’s beautiful and you feel comfortable, and these buildings in these neighborhoods, they’ve become the anchor points for these neighborhoods. And we saw during the pandemic not just these buildings, but the open spaces, the parks where people gathered. I mean, our houses are getting smaller and smaller. And these spaces are those third places where people go to gather, meet, get information. A call out to Edmonton Public Library, probably one of the best library systems in Canada. It’s an amazing library system. So much support there. You can go as a person and rent Wi-Fi for your home. I mean, we take it for granted, but you can rent it as a hotspot. You can rent, you know, all kinds of things there. But the amount of social value that brings to this citizenry and to me, they’ve become sort of like the church to the secular, you know, I mean, in a way, like these are … The city buildings are sort of the brooches and buttons to the fabric of the city. These are the places where you want to be. And they really anchor the place.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah. And public libraries and other spaces like that in municipalities are really like the last bastion of like a true public square for people to go that might not have access.

Carol Belanger I know people think of malls as public, but they’re not.

Diane Therrien-Hale But they’re not …

Carol Belanger We’re in a very cold climate in Edmonton and our rec centers, my God, you go there on a weekend in the winter and it’s like they’re, like, packed to the brim.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s like splash pads in the summer in the hot places because poor people don’t have pools or access to ….

Carol Belanger Fire hydrants …

Diane Therrien-Hale Fire hydrants, all those things. Yeah. So the definition of economic strength and infrastructure growth varies depending on who you ask. Some people see it strictly in terms of like hard numbers and hard value, but it sounds like there’s many different lenses being approached on this panel that should be considered as economic strength, including, I would argue, civic engagement and pride, local resilience and robust community services, both through official channels and growing less official ones like mutual aid that we see popping up in a lot of different communities. So what are some of the other ideas and considerations that should be factored into decisions being made back in our respective communities about what economic strength and fueling local economies really means on the ground?

Matti Siemiatycki Maybe I’ll start and pick up on that. I think too often in Canada we’ve tried to tackle all of our problems one at a time. We try to tackle the infrastructure deficit, we try to tackle the housing crisis, we try to tackle homelessness. We really need to think of these in a much more coordinated and integrated way. These are … They are all interconnected. To build 1.5 million homes in Ontario or 3 million homes across Canada without the accompanying social and community infrastructure is going to just push the problem down the road. And we’ll experience what we experienced in the 1950s and 60s and 70s when we built huge housing estates without all of the social infrastructure and without the quality that was just mentioned in terms of architecture and design. So we really need to be thinking in a much more coordinated way. We need to come up with ways of prioritizing. We are just not in a position anymore where we can say yes to everything, We need to figure out how you say no in a quicker way and how you say yes in a faster way. And these are some of the issues that could really accelerate and enable us to solve some of our economic challenges in Canada.

Zita Cobb And as we’re thinking about how to set priorities, because that seems to be a difficult challenge, I think we have to start from the ground where we live. And in the 4434 communities, I think the issues are very similar, but the specifics are very different. And we do seem to have an effective action problem. And someone this morning was talking about … we have to form coalitions. I think we need a lot more small governance of coming together in semi-formal, maybe temporary, coming together to get things done. But it has to be responding to the ground up before we start imposing top down kinds of solutions.

Steve Robins The line that stuck with me from this morning, though, was “execution eating strategy for breakfast”. And sometimes, you know, if you think about what we need for prosperous cities and for prosperous Canada, we need access to affordable energy. We need the ability for Canadians to be able to buy a home in a place that they can afford. I mean, that means it’s got to have the water pipe and the road and all the social services that connect to it. You need to have access to a way to get to work and to get to a job. A lot of the infrastructure we need, some of it comes with revenue sources associated with it. Some of it comes with opportunities where you can find a way to structure it in such a way that you can get it built faster. And sometimes I worry that we might spend too much time trying to get the plan perfect versus when you look at that queue. We know that municipalities are facing a challenge where there’s more infrastructure that they would say meets their priority bar than they can afford to fund. And so how can you use new tools, new ways of delivering projects to say, look, this project … it’s about building water infrastructure to support connecting new homes. So we actually know that there’s going to be people that are going to move into those homes. That’s a pretty easy risk to take. But it doesn’t fit in our current, you know, in our 15 year capital plan. But if only there was some way we can get that financed now, that creates opportunities for housing faster and sooner. I think that’s a real way to enable stronger communities faster.

Carol Belanger I was going to … key to that, too. And it it’s definitely not sexy. Is procurement … It’s like, Oh my God, whoever holds the keys to procurement holds the keys to design excellence because who you hire to do what you’re going to do makes the biggest difference. It really does.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah. But I mean, there is no such thing as, like, a perfect plan, right? Like, I spent time on municipal councils and the amount of time and energy that goes into these reports and plans and master plans and this, that then largely sit … Because by the time they’re finished them, half of them are kind of obsolete. Things move so quickly in this day and age. So how can we be planning in a way that is more responsive and reactive and as you mentioned, like bottom up rather than that top down? Because it really is and we’ve seen this come up every once in a while as a, you know, a national issue. Everybody’s angry at the federal government or provincial governments for what they’re putting forward when it’s not responsive to what municipalities or local communities truly need. And so we know, like AFCM who Canada Urban Institute works closely with put out they’re, you know, plan for a new municipal growth framework saying like, “here’s how we should be funding municipalities in a in a way that isn’t 19th century”. So you know how does our federal government bring that on and then how do we work at our different levels to say this is what we need to be doing at the grassroots level and up here you need to be listening …Does that make sense?

Zita Cobb It makes some sense because I don’t think Canada has any assets at all that are not in a place. Let’s think about that. Maybe we have assets that are not in some of these places across the country and place is like the natural way to understand anything and everything. It is the only place of real action. It’s the only place of resilience. And so if we just start from the ground, it’s not the bottom, it’s the ground and say, what do we need in these places? So what do we need to change, to make faster, to remove obstacles to … I mean, we could talk about the Infrastructure Bank. Like, I would love to do a deal with you, but you’re too big for me. And that’s a problem we had … That’s back to the scale problem. I don’t need $10 million for an electric bus on a little island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. So as things stand, since we don’t have a bank, we’re likely never going to get a bus because there’s no finance. So if you just start from any place and say, what are the conditions here? And who best knows those conditions? The people who live there. And so they’re the best stewards. And I think we just need to trust the ground a little bit more.

Matti Siemiatycki One of the things our peers do in other countries, and it’s been mentioned already, they are so much more systematic in prioritizing their infrastructure investments. And they have structures in place to do it, whether it’s Australia with their national infrastructure priority list, whether it’s New Zealand, which is so transparent, you can go on their website and see every project that’s in the pipeline currently or even in the United States, which has metropolitan planning organizations which bring people together in regions to talk about place-based priorities. We have to be able to prioritize faster so that we can build quicker. You plan slow so you can build fast. And we’ve really struggled with coming up with that priority list. And it leaves itself open to to the political whims. And I think we do have to talk about that. That infrastructure does have the opportunity and the potential to stir passions. And it is the type of things that can win and lose elections. And we’ve seen across the country that when people get behind a project, it can go even if on all other evaluations of its merits. It’s a terrible idea. And the bill comes due. The bill always does. It may be popular. It may get you elected, and ultimately someone will end up paying. And we have examples across the country of these white elephants that have just never paid off. And an evaluation up front would have clearly showed that. So we need to become much more systematic in how we’re making these decisions and our peers are doing it. And Canada’s ad-hocery is really posing a challenge for us.

Steve Robins One of the lessons, I think, that the Canada Infrastructure Bank has learned over the last four years, we’ve now gone from, you know, we now have 54 projects, I think, across the country that are under construction. And one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned, each of those projects have partners and how do we find a way to serve partners at the scale of those communities? How do we get down to be able to write a 5 or 10 or $15 million loan? It might still be too big with an indigenous community, to build water and wastewater infrastructure or to build the enabling infrastructure to support enabling urban development on an urban reserve, those sorts of challenges. The projects  … we’re a financier and the projects have a partner in the local community who said, “This is important enough that I want to engage in a financing transaction to get it built.” And that partnership element, I think has been the real key. And it’s taken a lot of learning from us to figure out how to shrink in some way so that we can still work on some of Canada’s largest projects, but also on the projects that are really impactful at a local community level.

Zita Cobb Okay, now we’re talking the same language. I like you already. I’m liking you better …

Steve Robins I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Zita Cobb But back to this scale problem, I mean, I think what we’re talking about is a question of development. What is development really? And I think we all need to remind ourselves that it’s not exactly the same as investment. And the more we can get investment to be less preoccupied with two and three years and more focused on a longer term and actually developing the assets we have, then we’re going to start to solve some of the scale problems.  I can do something in a smaller scale, I can give you something to salute if we talk to each other about that. In other words, if we are more informed from each place. And I understand it’s been done in other places. I was in the Faroe Islands this summer. The most incredible place. 50,000 people. What a booming economy. Because they decided they’re going to build tunnels that connect all these islands under the ocean. And so how did they get the money to do that? Well, I don’t know, they issued a 100 year bond. Somebody needs to look into this. Anyway, this 50,000 person set of islands is … the economy is on fire. They also started by saying, “we’re an island, we need an airline. We better have an airline.” And so that … So what we’re talking about, what they did, which is kind of what we’re talking about, is what are the enabling conditions to allow economic momentum. And some of them, we don’t have to discuss them because we know that transportation, janice was talking about Internet broadband, those things are just essential. These are … no matter where you live, if you live in an indigenous community in Nunavut, or you live in Toronto, you need these things. So let’s just agree those … I think we can agree those. And then after that, I was on a panel with Chris Hadfield once and he said, “Well, what you have to do is focus on the thing that can kill you next.” I think he meant like when you’re in outer space, we’re kind of in outer space … Anyway, so mayby housing is the thing that can kill us next. So let’s let’s figure that one out. 

Carol Belanger I was going to say beautiful housing. I was just at another amazing island, this October I got the chance to go to Fogo Island. And honestly, you have to be applauded for what you were able to do there. This spinoff … economics spinoff is amazing. The new restaurants that have popped up, I’ve never seen so many kids in the streets. And then I found out it’s because the power grid was down for an upgrade [Zita: That’a another problem]. So there was no … You know, there was no Internet, so all the kids are out in the roads. It was sort of funny, anyways, but I mean,  the other part that we talk about infrastructure, too, is it’s not just the new infrastructure, it’s the glut of the deferred maintenance on all our facilities. Now that alone is insane. Like we’re having to look at like, you know, we’re only patching the D and Fs and you know, like, it’s … The list keeps getting longer and longer. And so that’s what I find, too. And  it’s all that civic infrastructure that we have that we’ve been deferring maintenance on, that obviously … that’s part of the problem as well, too.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah.

Matti Siemiatycki Can I just say, I mean, to have 400 people in a room talking about deferred maintenance and you’re all not on your phones or asleep. Like, in some ways this tells us about Canada. Like, we can gripe about our problems, but there is … If we want to be slightly more optimistic about it, I mean, we are focused on trying to find solutions here. And I think it is interesting. The other piece is bringing together housing and infrastructure. We’ve done that in a much more serious way. The federal government department now bringing housing and infrastructure and communities together, I think is another piece of this story. And you’re seeing it filter down at the provincial levels and the municipal levels. But the deferred maintenance issue is something that, like everyone experiences day to day, whether it’s the potholes on the roads, whether it’s the bucket under the roof in your library when it rains, I mean, you’re just starting to see things. The wear and tear is becoming ever more clear to all of us. And so to have this audience here to talk about this, to turn this into action, I think is something that is cause for optimism.

Diane Therrien-Hale Yeah, I agree. And the point I was going to make that you brought up … talking about the kids and the people and, you know, coming from a political background and also now with the union, obviously our focus is on the workers and the people. And again, when we talk about community building and people talk about taxpayers and I’m always like, well, think about the kids. They don’t pay taxes, but we’re still building these cities and building these communities for them. And so often, a lot of the times I find in these, you know, it is discussions about infrastructure, discussions about budget. It removes that sort of human element from it when it’s really like, we’re all people that just want to live in healthy and safe and happy communities and have that interaction. And so how do we do that? And so there’s been some really good ideas from here. And obviously it looks different if you live in a remote community or if you live in a big city or mid-sized city or whatever it is. But it’s like, how do we bring that human aspect back to those political tables? Because having sat across political tables, it’s often not the priority, if that makes sense.

Zita Cobb And we’re measuring, like, silly things. [Yeah, exactly.[ I think, Frances didn’t say this morning that we’re measuring silly things, but I think we’re often like, we get into these bun fights about, ” oh whoa, productivity …” I mean, it’s just arithmetic. And it doesn’t help you … You can’t solve arithmetic. That’s just an outcome. So I think fundamentally, we have to come back to – those humans that are physical, they have to be somewhere that are social and meaning seeking. Say what do they need? Okay. Figuring out what they need and how to deliver it. That’s the process of development. And then you say, well, what are the levers? They’re not that different from place to place. I mean, geography makes it difficult if you’re far away from Toronto, for example, but we can understand them and solve them where they are. But I think the metrics are the right ones and what we should be trying to measure, and this … people talk about politics and all of this, it’s nothing more enraging than being told that the economy is doing fine when your economy is not doing so fine. I understand … Did I read yesterday that Stephen Politz said we’re now officially in a recession? I think everybody I know in Newfoundland went, “oh, thank God”, because I always thought we were. So now we can all agree that … then we all feel better now we can work from there. But I think it’s come back to the ground. There isn’t anything that we can’t solve if we put our minds to it at the ground level. You’re going to come out to Fogo Island and I’m going to show you what small looks like.

Steve Robins Begging for an invitation. Okay. The, I think that one of the core challenges when you have a conversation that starts from “we have infrastructure that you need to put a bucket under to catch the drip” is that there’s been so many rooms where we’ve sat and made funding choices about how much we’re willing to pay for infrastructure against all the other priorities that we have. And we’ve chosen for a whole host of very good reasons to not put enough in. And we … one of the challenges when you compare us to Australia and New Zealand or other places is the complexity of the different levels of government coming together to say, fund this project in this moment today. And the … I think one of the things that we spent a lot of time thinking about is how can we work with our partners to find a way for them to identify their infrastructure priorities? What’s the thing in their community or in their province or in their electricity grid that’s the next thing to solve. And then how can we help them with those priorities? How can we help manage the fact that if you are an electricity utility that’s saying, I’m experiencing a lot of customer growth because I’ve got data centers coming and saying I want to connect and I’ve got new industrial loads or industrial customers that are trying to decarbonize, that are asking for more electricity supply. And my customers are starting to try to add solar panels or heat pumps in their house. I’m struggling. How do I manage the affordability challenge that comes with investing my grid? Well, financing is a tool that can help solve that. It’s not a panacea that solves everything, but it’s one thing that you can use to try to unlock and empower local leaders to help.

Matti Siemiatycki So that’s … the number two and number three most boring topics to talk about. One is data. We have no idea what’s going on in this country with infrastructure. It’s been a running story in some of our newspapers about the lack of data across all segments of Canadian society. But infrastructure is probably up there as one of the worst with it. We need to be able to measure so that we can know what’s happening and know where to invest best. The other one, Steve, you mentioned financing. We have a funding problem. Financing is who’s going to lend you the money upfront. That’s what a bank does. But the bank doesn’t pay the money back. We have to pay the money back. We undercharged for many of our pieces of infrastructure. Drew talked about it earlier. We, compared to our peers, we use road tolls far less. We have governments that drop the cost of electricity for good social reasons and maybe even for good political reasons, but not for great policy reasons. And so it’s really … we’ve misaligned some of the incentives, and this is why we’re struggling with money. And this is going to be a compounding issue. You can finance things all you want. You can keep borrowing. But all of our levels of government are running huge deficits, perhaps with the exception of Alberta. And it’s going to pose a problem as we try to both fix the infrastructure we already have and build out the full suite of infrastructure we need for the next generation.

Zita Cobb Where did all the money go? And what I mean by that is, isn’t the financial economy five times bigger than the real economy now, compared to, say, 3 or 4 decades ago? Where did all the money go? Like, it’s an enormous financial economy. So is there some hoarding going on somewhere? I don’t have the answer to that. But if the financial economy has grown that much and the real economy needs investment, where did it go? Do you know? It’s probably in an ugly building somewhere. Anyway, I think we have to get the money back.

Diane Therrien-Hale That’s an interesting question. I have a lot I could say on that. There was a question that came in from the audience that’s going back to this theme of prioritization. So, like the solution of prioritizing things has come up a few times. And what do we think needs to change below the surface to be able to prioritize? And is that a change in values? And one of the things that I was noticing was looking around the room is like, who’s missing? Right? And I don’t know if there’s anybody under 30, maybe a few of you. It’s not that long ago that I fell in that category … well, close to a decade now. But it’s like, again, a lot of the times there’s such brilliance in this room and such diversity, but the young folks aren’t aren’t here and they’re the ones that are going to be inheriting all this stuff that we’re talking about and all these messages that we’re talking about. And so what are the other ways that we can make sure these are, you know, more inclusive and that we’re prioritizing not just specific projects necessarily, but voices. So that’s something that I think about a lot. And I think, you know, again, different geographic areas sometimes feel like they’re left out of the conversation. Certainly different demographics do, and they all have a part to play in that. And because there does tend to be some that really dominate it, the ones that are hoarding all the money.

Zita Cobb Yes. We’ve got to find them.

Matti Siemiatycki And maybe I’ll pick up on some of this. This is the consultation conundrum to some extent that, you know, the usual folks turn out to the consultations around housing and around infrastructure. And then when the projects start and if we’re honest, the usual folks tend to exclude a lot of newcomers, a lot of racialized Canadians and a lot of young people. And then the unhoused people as well. And so the projects get started and then people start complaining like, who agreed to this? When was the consultation? And oftentimes the agencies will bring out their spreadsheets and say, “yeah, we did ten consultations”. They were at this location at this time, but the room wasn’t representative or it was during a time when people couldn’t come. So I think on the consultation side, we struggle to make that efficient and not something that is a brake on projects, but a way of engaging people, making the projects better and finding a faster way to approve them. The other thing I think we struggled with and maybe, Steve, you have some thoughts on this, is – the spaces where our different levels of government come together. Do we have regular spaces where they come together to discuss their issues outside of the political and partizan focus to be able to come up with the common needs in their communities? Because it seems like we’re missing that table and that table’s then not informed by evidence and data. And so you just get cherry picking of projects that are politically adventagous.

Zita Cobb I think that is a really important thing. I think that as much as I believe in the ground and what is a community, it’s every institution, organization and person that’s in a place. And I think there … Mary hates it when I say this, but we have a coherence problem in many local places. And so if you go into a community anywhere in the country and try and figure out what is this community thinking or want, it’s the most terrifying question to ask is “who’s responsible for the economy here, for the planning of it?” So while that I think must be all of us, but all of us haven’t figured out the kind of structures and they can be semi-formal structures to come together because I do believe wherever the money is hiding, resources will follow coherence. And we don’t have enough coherence at the local level. So I think there’s a huge opportunity. And if you go into those communities, you’re going to find the 30 year olds and the 20 year olds they’re are all there. We’re all in a place. And so I think that we have a lot of work to do on the various … on the ground in all the places that will say to you, these are the things we want to get done. This is what’s going to kill us next.

Steve Robins The number that’s going to stick with me from this panel is the 4430 local jurisdictions.

Zita Cobb 637 of them are indigenous communities.

Steve Robins And I think if you are a project developer, you actually experience it as far more in terms of the experience between a provincial, a municipal, a federal regulatory approval, the funding partner that you have that might not be talking to the regulator, all of the different … It’s not just the local community consultation, but the number of things that have to come together in one moment in time to get a project built is really quite substantial. And so I think there’s a big conversation to have around prioritization and how we evaluate projects. And there’s a second conversation which says, how do we actually make sure that we can line up, simplify, look at the total of what it takes to get a project built and think about the coherence of that, or maybe just the simplification of that to increase the coherence in a way that allows you to build the stuff we need faster in a more inclusive, more engaging way.

Zita Cobb And the closer to the ground you are, if  you’re holding the big stick, the more likely it’s going to go fast.

Diane Therrien-Hale Okay, So we’re running down to the last two minutes. So I’m going to say, like everybody gets 30s to give us your words of wisdom in closing. Go.

Carol Belanger If you do something, do it right. Like I said, you’re going to get one chance to do it, so do the best anyways. And so if anybody needs to hire an amazing architect, call me. I can help you hire somebody.

Diane Therrien-Hale Thank you.

Zita Cobb Start from the ground. Organize, organize and reach out, belong to the world, you know your priorities.

Steve Robins As Frances said this morning, investing in infrastructure isn’t inflationary. And it helps create that supply that is the underpinning for economic growth and for our shared prosperity. And so how do we keep investing in the things that help raise our standards of living?

Matti Siemiatycki Not all infrastructure projects are created equal. Infrastructure can deliver benefits. It can also mire you in debt and crisis. Pick the right projects. Do it with sensible people. Pick experts to deliver who have experience in those fields and then go with confidence.

Zita Cobb We have one minute.

Diane Therrien-Hale I know that you guys didn’t use your full 30s, so …

Zita Cobb I just think we have to think about knitting the country like we need more horizontal stickiness and connectivity. And I don’t just mean regional air access, I mean ways to have these kinds of conversations. We are in the process of building something that needs a better name, but it’s a network for community economies which will have an institute that supports good and best practices. We work with Mary and CUI, because they have that Main Street Program, because, you know, we can go to Victoria and we go to Hamilton, we can go to St John’s. And actually the issues are similar, the specifics are different. So bottom up, top down.

Diane Therrien-Hale Include Peterborough and I’d be happy to … Okay. Any final words of wisdom? I’d like to thank you guys so much for being here. And thanks to Mary and the team again for organizing.