After multiple water main bursts and flooding across Canada this summer, municipalities and experts are warning that urban flooding could become more frequent as Canada’s infrastructure ages.
“Canada has great infrastructure. The problem is it’s aging and we’re not keeping up,” John Gamble, president of the Canadian Association of Consulting and Engineering Companies, told CBC News.
A major water pipe burst in Montreal on Friday, causing flooding and prompting a boil water advisory, the latest in a series of infrastructure failures in recent months.
The City of Calgary declared a local state of emergency in June after a major water main burst in the city and asked residents to reduce their water consumption.
The severe storm that caused widespread flooding on Toronto streets last month City infrastructure is built to withstand heavy rainsVancouver The area experienced relatively minor flooding in June.After a sewer main burst in the Olympic Village.
“Unfortunately, unless there’s a real effort to proactively address some of the infrastructure issues in this country, we’re going to see more of these cases, not less,” Gamble said.
In June, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) called for a meeting of all three levels of government to discuss threats facing municipalities, including aging infrastructure.
“Municipalities own about 60 per cent of the country’s infrastructure, but when it comes to taxes, they get less. Of every tax dollar collected, 8 to 10 cents goes to municipalities,” FCM president Jeff Stewart told CBC News.
Stewart said the city’s infrastructure funding model is outdated and doesn’t take into account factors such as: Rapid population growth And climate change.
“This bill is not designed to address this massive infrastructure that we have. It’s not designed to address any of the issues of climate change, climate adaptation, and it puts a very heavy burden on municipalities,” he said.
Mati Szimiatycki, director of the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute, spoke to CBC’s Front Burner about why cities across the country are collapsing and what can be done about it.
Mary Rowe, director of the Canadian Urban Institute, agreed that infrastructure development is an unfair burden on municipalities.
“I think the dilemma we have in this country is we have a funding system that puts local governments at the end of the pipe,” she said. “Basically, local governments get whatever gets to them.”
Gamble said one of the problems facing municipalities was the fact that water infrastructure was built using flood data that is now outdated due to climate change.
“As we have seen in recent years, we can no longer rely blindly on it,” he said.
Both Gamble and Rowe said there was an urgent need for the three governments to work together to repair and upgrade infrastructure.
“Infrastructure is capital intensive and it’s hard to put the tax burden on the lowest level of government, which is why we need three levels of government working together on this issue,” Gamble said.
But Lowe noted that infrastructure maintenance and planning work tends to outlast a government’s lifespan, making it difficult for the government to get involved.
“These are long-term issues and political cycles are shorter, so I think it’s hard for politicians to make commitments that go beyond their mandate and their term of office,” she said.
“If you look back at previous Conservative and Liberal governments, there have been some very generous, very substantial infrastructure programs, but what you’ve typically seen is a pattern of one program finishing before anyone starts talking about the next one,” Gamble said.
Experts say national assessment is urgently needed
Gamble said a key step in addressing the issue is to launch a national assessment to identify Canada’s long-term infrastructure needs. He noted that the federal Liberal government promised to present such a national assessment in 2021, but that promise has yet to be fulfilled.
“The sooner the better, because that will result in very good public policy, not just across infrastructure but across many other elements of public policy.” [that] “It depends on our infrastructure,” he said.
A spokesman for Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said the government was still working on establishing an advisory committee to carry out a national assessment.
“In line with recommendations from the public hearings, which highlighted the importance of an evidence-based and transparent process, we plan to establish an advisory body in the coming months,” a spokesperson for Fraser’s office said in an emailed statement.
Rowe agreed that a national assessment would be helpful, but he worries some issues will get lost in the details.
“Maybe what we should be doing is figuring out how to properly resource municipal governments and regional associations across the country, understand what their priorities are and aggregate that to create a national assessment,” she said.
“I worry sometimes that we’ve just set such big, ambitious goals that span all of Canada, and that it’s going to be so complicated and expensive and labor-intensive to achieve them, that we’re not actually going to make the problem smaller.”
Gamble said something needs to be done quickly to preserve Canada’s current infrastructure before it completely deteriorates and becomes a much more costly problem for governments at all levels.
“It’s much more costly to fix these problems after the fact,” he said.
