Ottawa’s poorly structured infrastructure spending needs a rethink

On 19 April 2018, Sean Speer and I wrote for Inside Policy on the manifest failures of Ottawa’s infrastructure programme. The idea that taxpayers, rather than those who actually use and benefit from infrastructure, should foot the bill is an assumption that guarantees that infrastructure will continue to be overbuilt and much more costly than it needs to be. Moreover, the assumption that Canada’s infrastructure desperately needs massive infusions of taxpayer cash is belied by the difficulty Ottawa has in finding real infrastructure projects worthy of support.