In 2003, I published a book on public infrastructure in Canada, called Down the Road Never Travelled. It warned against infrastructure deficits and how much more money we’d have to spend rebuilding roads, sewers and bridges if we didn’t devote enough resources to their upkeep. I’m finding myself at the public park with beer in my hand and a bad case of déjà vu.
Did you see that the Alcohol in Parks pilot will continue this year? We can drink adult beverages in designated areas in designated parks at designated hours and only if we behave, and nowhere near beaches, rinks, playgrounds, or parking lots, but still. We’re sort of mostly allowed to chug a brewski and ponder the state of what’s under our feet.
We have a public infrastructure deficit in Ottawa of about $3.8 billion dollars. That’s the amount we’d need to spend to bring our stuff (roads, parks, sidewalks — but not water and sewer infrastructure, which is funded separately) up to acceptable standards from their current sorry state. Not build new stuff. Just making sure what we already have doesn’t fall apart, either comically or catastrophically.
The problem? We’re only planning to spend $1.2 billion, which means the deficit will continue to grow.
As I explained in my book, the difficulty with infrastructure is that a lot of it is hidden and suffers from that terrible affliction known, in technical terms, as “being boring.”
If you’re a politician trolling for votes, do you want to point to a shiny new recreation centre or lovely new bridge as some of the best achievements of your past term, or the sewer you can’t see that isn’t causing leaks you also have no idea about? Which one makes for a more interesting photo backdrop?
Among the possibilities to fund repairs to unsexy but necessary infrastructure, municipal leaders are currently debating a 1 per cent levy that would add less than $50 a year to the average tax bill. Opinions are mixed on this because it’s a new tax no matter how you slice it, and others like Capital Coun. Shawn Menard worry that “the way the city is going, we would fund something like a ‘really nice to have’ like a Lansdowne development or more expansion driven boundary.” I wonder if Menard has read my book?
And then there’s the “where.” Everyone pays, and everyone wants to benefit, but by definition the older infrastructure is in the older parts of the city and you get into a problem with suburbanites not being overly keen to see their tax dollars going to fix areas they rarely visit. Which is understandable, but doesn’t help us fix our problems.
We could, I suppose, trap tourists in an impenetrable maze and force them to gamble all their cash in our casino before letting them out? That might work. Or better yet, we could become stock market geniuses and grow our pot of money by picking an amazing portfolio. Don’t laugh; the city has, after years of dawdling, started investing its long-term reserve funds into the stock markets but since it waited so long, it missed out on the 25 per cent increase that has made a whole bunch of people rich but not us. “A day late and a dollar short” should be our new slogan from now on. It’s a lot more accurate than “Technically beautiful.”
The lesson from my book was that badly needed repairs tend not to get done because everyone focuses on building new things at the expense of fixing boring old ones. And today that deficit is even bigger. We need to bite the bullet instead of deferring maintenance until it falls apart on our kids’ heads at the splash pad while we sip from a can of Dominion City beer.
Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.
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