The Canadian Chamber of Commerce – Infrastructure Report Stuck in Traffic for 10,000 Years: Canadian Problems that Infrastructure Investment Can Solve.
Published originally by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
Ten thousand years is how much additional time commuters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver spend stuck in traffic every single year as a result of road congestion from key bottlenecks in those cities. This severe congestion is an issue not just for businesses and residents of those cities, but for the entire Canadian economy. Highly focused infrastructure investments can help solve this problem and other major economic challenges that Canada faces.
In 2013’s The Foundations of a Competitive Canada, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce identified key principles of sound public infrastructure investment. The Chamber’s 2016 report, The Infrastructure That Matters Most, made the case for increased trade infrastructure investment to drive Canada’s international competitiveness.
What follows is an outline of seven problems in Canada that strategic public-private infrastructure investment can help solve.
Public infrastructure investment has been placed at the centre of the federal government’s economic plan through its commitment of $180 billion in new infrastructure funding over the next decade. This funding will be accompanied by hundreds of billions of infrastructure dollars from provincial, territorial and municipal governments.
At the same time, the private sector continues to bring forward significant investments in Canada’ non-publicly owned infrastructure, including Canada’s telecommunications, pipeline and rail networks. While most of these projects do not seek public funding, they do require various government approvals through regulatory and other permitting processes.
There is an opportunity for the next decade of infrastructure investment in Canada to be truly nation changing by unleashing the private sector and targeting specific economic problems through public investment. The problems identified in this report are not the only problems in Canada that infrastructure investments should target, nor is infrastructure the sole means of solving them. However, they are important economic issues that demand federal focus to better prepare Canada for the economic, environmental and technological changes that lie ahead.