A White Paper on Reforming Canada's Transportation Policies for the 21st Century

While much of the developed world struggles with debt and chronically low growth, Canada, one of the best-performing members of the G-7, remains on firmer footing. However, this country still has to cope with slower growth, cutbacks and aging infrastructure. As this paper argues, reconciling these facts will take creative, non-partisan problem solving, and it is time governments got to work. Particularly brave politicians might consider charging the public the full costs of infrastructure use in the form of a tax. For the less daring, advances in robotics and data management offer substantial efficiency gains. Whichever path Canadian governments choose, they will not travel it alone. The burgeoning power of social media will amplify citizens’ voices and involvement. However, private sector expertise and capital could be just what is needed to ease Canada’s looming infrastructure woes, notably in the form of infrastructure banks (iBanks); cost-effective, streamlined replacements for the tangled mass of programs and departments that currently build, manage and maintain public infrastructure. Such an institution could allow private investment vehicles like bonds, preference shares and mortgage-backed securities to be issued to create capital and to pay back investors as the objects of its investments repaid the capital borrowed. iBanks could raise tricky problems about overlapping jurisdictions and would, in some parts of the country, be a tough sell, but Canada has been lagging badly in transportation innovation and must consider unorthodox solutions.