Video—Federal Support for Sustainable Municipal Infrastructure

Video Transcript

This report is important because Canada has spent a lot of money on infrastructure and it plans on spending more money on infrastructure. It’s really important when you’re spending money on infrastructure that you’re thinking long term: 30, 50 years out. And if you’re going to be thinking long-term, you need to think about the sustainability of that infrastructure. And right now, with changing climatic factors, we need to bring climate change into our thinking, as we plan our infrastructure spending. When you build resilient infrastructure, you build resilient communities.

We found a couple of things. One thing that we found was that Infrastructure Canada does not have enough information on the state of infrastructure as it currently stands. It doesn’t understand enough about the funding needs of municipalities, nor the sustainability challenges that municipalities are facing.

We looked then, in particular, at the Gas Tax Fund, and we found that although the spending in the Gas Tax Fund was initially supposed to be for projects that will result in cleaner water, cleaner air, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, the federal government had no measures of performance to be able to tell us whether or not that $13 billion achieved those environmental and sustainability objectives at the municipal levels.