On Thursday morning, one of the busiest subway lines in Toronto was shut down from 7 to 9:30 a.m., the entirety of the morning rush. It sent many thousands of people out into the streets to wait for shuttle buses, hail cabs or head home to get their cars and then line up in streets more jammed than usual.
It was assumed by many — this columnist included — that the culprit was the first snowfall of the year, a measly one-centimetre dusting being enough to grind Canada’s most populous city to a halt. That’s because it’s happened before, the snow and the cold shutting down the city’s subway.
The Toronto Transit Commission later explained that this wasn’t at all a weather issue but a short circuit power issue. But regardless of the cause, these sorts of infrastructure breakdowns are more likely to happen in the years to come.
And not just with subways. And not just in Toronto. Because the truth is that Canada’s infrastructure stock is ailing before our eyes and hardly anyone is talking about it.
In early October the 2019 edition of the Canadian Infrastructure Report Card was released, a collective effort on the part of various groups, including the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Canadian Public Works Association, to monitor the state of infrastructure across the country. Their overall finding this time around was that “the state of our infrastructure is at risk, which should be cause for concern for all Canadians.”
The report’s experts calculated that 39% of the roads, bridges and tunnels in Canada are in very poor, poor or fair condition. “There are enough Canadian roads in poor condition to build a road almost halfway to the moon,” they explain.
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