Infrastructure Worry: Municipalities eye Building Canada Fund

NRU
March 19, 2014
By Sarah Ratchford

Municipal officials, including some in the Greater Toronto Area, say they are worried about the potential exclusion of some local infrastructure projects from the federal Building Canada Fund that takes effect April 1.

The fund, which allocates $14-billion over 10 years for building and maintenance of infrastructure, may not apply to municipal roads, according to the president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

“We heard that the local roads will be excluded,” FCM president Claude Dauphin told NRU. “Many of our members are small municipalities. In rural Canada, sometimes [roads are] the only infrastructure that they have.”

Dauphin says his organization is seeking clarification from Infrastructure Canada on what are eligible municipal projects for federal funding.

“If you exclude local roads, for us, that’s a big problem.” Dauphin says his concerns likely wouldn’t exist if the federal government had consulted with the FCM during the last budget, but he says that didn’t happen.

Halton Hills councillor Clark Somerville, third vice-president of FCM, says he is concerned about access to the fund for smaller, more rural municipalities in the GTA if roads are not considered eligible for funding.

But Somerville said he believes some of the FCM’s issues with the fund can be rectified through further discussion with the federal ministry.

“What I would suggest is further consultation,” he tells NRU. “There can be easy solutions found for a lot of these.”

The Building Canada Fund, announced in February, is part of the federal government’s Building Canada Plan launched in 2007. When the new fund was announced last month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stressed that it would provide support to smaller municipalities to build the infrastructure they need most.

In a recent release, FCM also raised concerns about what it views as a lack of clearly-allocated funds for municipalities and a requirement that every project valued at more than $100-million be assessed as a public-private partnership. The government promotes such collaboration on infrastructure projects as a “long-term performance-based approach to procuring public infrastructure where the private sector assumes a major share of the risks in terms of financing and construction ... from design and planning, to long-term maintenance.”

FCM’s Dauphin says the inclusion of private-public partnerships in the funding formula may not work well in the municipal arena.

“First of all, the municipalities in Canada own more than 60 per cent of all the infrastructure in the country, and we don’t know what percentage of that $14-billion [will be allocated to them] over the next 10 years.”

“What will be the share of the municipalities?” he asks. “Provinces are able to apply, and even the universities are able to apply. We would like a statement saying that the municipalities will have at least 60 per cent, or maybe more, of the [Building Canada Fund].”

Despite their concerns, both Somerville and Dauphin say they’re pleased with the fund’s announcement. Dauphin says the FCM has been “pleading” with the government for such a fund for years. Now that one exists, he says, he just wants to be sure municipalities get their fair share.

Infrastructure Canada did not respond to a request for comment and clarification as to whether local roads are included as projects funded by the initiative by NRU’s deadline.