Aging Infrastructure Will Cost Canada Big

Canadian cities are facing major backlogs in terms of maintaining and updating infrastructure. Putting off the work is expected to cost cities billions.

1 minute read

April 8, 2011, 8:00 AM PDT

By Nate Berg


"Quite a bit of the nation's civic infrastructure dates back to the 1960s and '70s, a time when governments spent almost five per cent of GDP, or two to three times the low of a few years later, to build things. So all this is 40 or 50 years old -plus all the assets that are even older, maybe much older.

Yet routine maintenance and even full-fledged rehabilitation was all too easy to put off by governments struggling to balance their books throughout the 1990s and the early years of the decade just ended, Vander Ploeg noted."

Spending on infrastructure has increased in recent years, though not enough, according to this article.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 in The Vancouver Sun

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