Why Canada’s infrastructure planning phase never ends

In today’s Big Story Podcast, in 2021, then minister-in-charge Catherine McKenna announced a process to assess all of Canada’s existing infrastructure. A plan to better use $180 billion to fix, modernize and improve it over the next dozen years. After that announcement the government began a consultation process on how to do the assessment. At some point in the process there were roundtable discussions, written submissions, a report summarizing those submissions and discussions — and everything but an infrastructure assessment.

“They hired a think tank at the University of Ottawa … to look at how other countries that do this — and the UK, Australia, New Zealand, there are like peer countries that have examples for us to follow. They filed that report, great big door stopper of a thing. Since then, truly nothing visible has happened on it in two and a half years now,” says David Reevely, Ottawa correspondent for business and tech publication The Logic.

What do we know and what don’t we know about the state of Canada’s roads and bridges, pipes and public places? Why hasn’t the assessment even begun, years later? Why does the saga of the infrastructure assessment seem to explain so much of how our governments can operate, and why is it so darkly funny?

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