More than a quarter of Montreal’s roads are in bad condition, auditor general’s report finds

More than a quarter of Montreal’s roads are in “bad” or “very bad” condition, the city’s auditor general said in a report released Tuesday. 

Andrée Cossette, the auditor general, said in her annual report that the latest evaluations show 25 per cent of Montreal’s arterial roads and 37 per cent of its local roads needed at least some maintenance work, or at most a full redo. 

“We conclude that the City of Montreal has not established sufficient mechanisms to ensure efficient management of maintenance and upkeep of arterial and local roads,” Cossette wrote. 

The report comes as the city’s municipal election approaches. Montrealers will head to the polls in November to elect a new mayor and Cossette’s report says Montrealers have identified road maintenance as the top area in which the city needs to improve its level of service.

The auditor general’s report says the city estimates it would take a $3.3 billion investment to get the crumbling roads back into satisfactory condition.

The report’s key findings include criticism of the city’s system for managing construction sites. Montreal has no formal system to co-ordinate construction sites, it says. 

“In a context of limited resources,” Cossette wrote, “rigorous and structured management is necessary to optimize intervention costs and offer a satisfactory level of service to citizens.”

Luc Rabouin, the mayor of the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough and the successor to Mayor Valérie Plante as leader of the Projet Montréal political party, said Tuesday that the city was playing catch-up on road maintenance — and that they had been doing so for years. 

He said the city has been working to repair infrastructure and, when they do, to redo a whole road surface all at once to avoid having multiple construction sites affect the same area. 

“We want to be careful to not multiply construction sites,” he said in an interview on Radio-Canada’s Tout un matin. “We’re catching up, and we’re going to continue to catch up. We know there could be improvements.”

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Speaking at an afternoon news conference at city hall, Soraya Martinez Ferrada, the mayoral candidate for Ensemble Montréal, said the city’s current administration was to blame for the crumbling roads. 

She also heaped blame on Rabouin, her rival in the upcoming election. The auditor general highlighted his borough as one of the worst in the city, with 52 per cent of roads in either bad or very bad condition.

“This is a decision not only made by this administration but the mayor of the Plateau is in the worst borough in terms of management, in terms of investments in our streets,” she said. 

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The report says some boroughs are doing worse than others.

Sixty per cent of the roads in Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, for one, were in bad or very bad condition. Saint-Laurent, by contrast, had only eight per cent of its roads in the same state. 

The report also says the city’s larger strategic plan, Montreal 2030, includes language about the need for Montreal to maintain its roads, but lacks clear, measurable objectives for how the city ought to be doing that. 

“This lack of explicit guidance can lead to differing interpretations within the City, impacting decisions and operational activities,” the report says. 

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Some boroughs have also failed to use their budgets allocated to the mechanized filling of potholes. For example, Ahuntsic-Cartierville did not spend a single dollar on pothole treatment in all of 2023. Other boroughs underspent significantly. That same year, for example, the Sud-Ouest only used $5,000 of its nearly $100,000 budget on pothole treatment.

In some cases, the report said this was due to repeated breaking of machines. 

The report includes recommendations intended to help the city improve its management of road work. 

The recommendations are largely focused on improving the co-ordination between city departments, making municipal teams more efficient and providing accountability for the continued state of road maintenance. 

The audit of the city’s road maintenance operations took place from Jan. 1, 2021 until Dec. 31, 2024, but Cossette said the bulk of her work place between April 2024 and February 2025. 

It consisted of interviews with city personnel, examinations of documents and surveys to obtain “probing and important information,” the report said. 

The latest evaluations of Montreal’s roads date back to 2020 for arterial roads and 2022 for local roads. The city estimates roads may have deteriorated further since then. In 2024, the city estimated that as many as 30 per cent of arterial roads and 40 per cent of local roads may be in dire shape.