Crumbling

Only a few weeks before many Canadians will choose their new municipal leaders, the Globe and Mail highlights the severe underfunding of municipal infrastructure over the last three decades:

The Montreal-area overpass that collapsed less than two weeks ago was built in 1970 during Canada's Golden Age of infrastructure spending, when roads, sewers and bridges still enjoyed pride of place in government budgets.

New investment on infrastructure grew at a rapid 4.8-per-cent clip annually between 1955 and 1977...

Between 1978 and 2000, new government infrastructure spending grew at only 0.1 per cent a year.

Today, long-ignored demands to refurbish decades of bricks and mortar have piled up. Estimates of the infrastructure replacement backlog range from $60-billion for cities to $125-billion to fix everything that is not being fixed...

In Calgary, for instance, the city is only now overhauling a downtown bridge first built in 1912. Mayor David Bronconnier says the 94-year-old structure is among several bridges “literally ready to fall down” and “just one of many examples we have of deferred maintenance.”

He said Calgary needs $5.5-billion over 10 years to replace and repair old infrastructure as well as meet new demands — cash it can't provide by itself.

“In Calgary's case, 66 cents out of every tax dollar goes to the federal government, 29 per cent to the province and only 5 per cent to the local level,” he said. “That is a fiscal imbalance of epic proportions.”...

Municipal leaders say their infrastructure trouble is exacerbated by the increasing pressure they face to spend money on social problems that other levels of government aren't sufficiently addressing, from English training to immigration settlement to urban native needs.

“There's 3,000 people on the streets of Calgary who are homeless,” Mr. Bronconnier said. “Should property tax dollars go to service that when you've got a federal government running a $13-billion surplus?”

In retrospect, critics say, Canadian politicians should have set money aside regularly to prepare for replacement costs of the new infrastructure they were rolling out.

“Our present system is design, build and forget,” McGill's Prof. Mirza said.

While part of the problem lies with past (and in some cases current) underinvestment in maintenance by municipalities, it's too late to change that part of the equation. But there's no reason at all why the current strong fiscal position of both the federal government and the bulk of the provinces can't be applied to make up for some of the gap which those levels of government helped to create. And with the Laval overpass tragedy still fresh in the minds of Canadians, now may be just the right time for all three levels of government to reach agreement as to how to get maintenance funding where it needs to go.