Canadian towns and cities are on the hook for billions in infrastructure spending they can't afford |
In his quietly blistering Davos speech, Prime Minister Mark Carney underscored that our current global rupture “calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.”
The same holds here at home, too.
Our country is in a productivity crisis. We lag behind the US by 28 per cent. The OECD predicts Canada will be its worst performing advanced member country over the next four decades. We cannot meet the threats to global order and sovereignty without rectifying this. But we cannot be more productive without first being resilient. And we cannot be resilient without honestly looking at Canada as it is.
The Canadian Climate Institute’s new Prepare or Repair report underscores this in analyzing the costs required to maintain infrastructure in Canada over the next 80 years. The numbers are stark. Maintaining already aging assets in good repair will cost an average of $112 billion each year. That’s a third more than the entire Canadian Armed Forces Budget. Climate change has added close to $9 billion each year to these costs, expected to rise to $14.3 billion each year by mid-century. Almost two thirds (60 per cent) of our country’s infrastructure is owned by municipalities; of the $112 billion in costs, municipalities will be on the hook for more than $80 billion. Despite owning the vast majority of public infrastructure in Canada, municipalities do not have the fiscal capacity required to maintain and improve the fundamental infrastructure used to take our kids to school, build our businesses, visit our loved ones, transport our products and service our communities. Put simply: the local governments who are least equipped to manage these expenses are bearing the burden of them.
These costs are variable only in that they will get higher with greater emissions and longer inaction on climate change. Despite rampant, growing climate disinformation that would simply wish the effects of climate change away, ideology cannot repair concrete, divert or contain floodwaters or prevent fires from levelling whole communities and turning our summers into a living hell.
Add another $8.4 billion in insurable losses from climate impacts in 2024 alone, or the lost revenue from cancelled events, declining tourism and poorer agricultural output due to extreme weather, and it becomes abundantly clear: we cannot increase productivity without acknowledging, then rectifying, the pressures — financial, social and environmental — that municipalities are facing due to climate consequences and climate inaction.
We must recognize — across all orders of government — the scale of the problem, the urgency of the solution and the need for municipal voices to be at the very heart of problem-solving and progress.
There is simply no room, in budgets or human bandwidth, for municipalities to adequately contribute to the rapid upscaling of productivity when they increasingly lurch from crisis to crisis, writes Zoe Grams
There is simply no room, in budgets or human bandwidth, for municipalities to adequately contribute to the rapid upscaling of productivity when they increasingly lurch from crisis to crisis. You cannot invest in public transit when your bridges are crumbling. You cannot launch new business centres when your community is being evacuated. You cannot encourage skilled worker retention when housing is unsafe due to extreme heat.There are already important discussions underway across orders of government on how to address our infrastructure challenges, including recommendations to develop a long-term national infrastructure plan, to implement a robust national resilience strategy and to renew federal-provincial-municipal funding partnerships to ensure funding matches responsibility.
These are all worthy strategies. As we explore these and others, the urgency of what they are solving cannot be forgotten. As I hear from mayors and councillors across the country, municipalities are asking that, collectively, we go further than merely weathering, merely coping and merely recovering from climate impacts.
Figures about our infrastructure are not only a dire warning. They are an invitation to all of us to recognize the scale of challenge our communities — and our local leaders — face and to our federal government to urgently support the solutions. Only by looking at Canada as it can we build the resilience required for both productivity and prosperity amidst a new world order.
Zoe Grams is executive director of Climate Caucus: a national, non-partisan non-profit supporting local elected leaders to enact climate policies for and with their communities and advocating for federal climate initiatives that meet the urgency of our times.