Infrastructure – how do we pay for it?

By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express

Unless you’ve been actively avoiding local news the past couple of weeks, you’ve likely heard about Mayor John Tory’s proposal for the future of Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway and Gardiner Expressway: start charging tolls.

Under Tory’s proposed plan, drivers hitting those highways would have to pay $2 each way, with that money – he says such a plan would raise about $200 million every year – going towards the long overdue reconstruction of those highways. Tory says such tolls are necessary because the city is facing a multi-billion dollar infrastructure deficit in the coming years. After all, those road maintenance, highway rehabilitation and other land development projects aren’t going to pay for themselves.

And while I really do not like the idea of toll roads – I only use the 407 as an absolute last resort and loathed having to throw my change into a bin every few miles when I was in Louisiana last year – I applaud Tory’s efforts to actually do something about the problem his city is facing, rather than go cap in hand to Queen’s Park or Parliament Hill and get them to fix it.

And this infrastructure problem is one being faced by municipalities not only in Ontario, but also across the country and around the world. Even right here in Durham Region, there are millions of dollars needed in order to catch up and stay on top of the growing list of infrastructure projects.

However, the infrastructure debate typically boils down to two options: you either have to raise local taxes, or you have to submit an application to the feds or the province and hope that some money makes its way down. And it goes without saying that just about nobody wants to go for the prior option.

However, kicking the can and hoping it comes back to you is not the best way to go about things. A 2014 report by Canada2020 found that, at that time, the municipal infrastructure deficit for the entire country was $123 billion and going up by about $2 billion every year. We cannot seriously expect that the feds and/or province are going to suddenly produce that much money to fix everything – after all, that 2014 total is about 40 per cent of what the federal government spent as a whole this year.

So the grim reality of all of this is that we have two options:

• We need to have a serious, and likely tough, conversation about taxes and budgets. Are there things that are currently being paid for by municipalities that don’t need to be? Are there private sector options that would prove to be more economical than public? Or are we going to have to face the idea that if we want things, we need to pay for it? After all, as the old cliché goes, nothing in life is free. Or,
• We need to figure out alternative ways to raise money for infrastructure projects. Do we take a page out of Norway’s and the Northwest Territories’ book and look at the creation of a national sovereignty fund, with a certain amount of money made from, say, resource extraction put away into a fund to gain interest or be invested (wisely) that can only be used for certain items? Norway’s fund currently has the equivalent of nearly $1 trillion. Do we need to look at what many states in America have done and start putting in toll roads?

Regardless of the method we, either on a national, provincial or local level, decide to go, we need to start having these conversations sooner rather than later. The cyclical bickering about not wanting to raise taxes to going to the province and feds to ask for money and not getting it is getting us nowhere. And in the mean time, our roads still need to be repaired, bridges replaced and more.

If you have any ideas, I encourage you to write a letter to the editor. After all, there’s only a benefit in having more ideas and options out there.