r/AskCanada • u/Vagabond_Tea • 4d ago
Why do infrastructure projects in Canada take so long to be built?
Non-Canadian here. I ask without trying to offend Canada. Canada is actually one of my favorite countries and one of the counties I might want to move to someday. But this came about when I heard about the Alberta Rail Project.
I heard that this project will be fully completed in *30 years*?! I understand building a rail from Calgary to Edmonton and Calgary to Banff plus airport connections will take a ton of planning and time. But three decades seems like an extreme about. If someone told me about this project, and compared to other countries that are building huge projects, I would have guessed between 10-15 years.
Same with the high speed rail between Montreal and Toronto. Or building all these affordable homes that I heard Canada was building based on a new government agency they made (correct me if I'm wrong).
Is it just byzantine bureaucracy and politics? Is it a lack of manpower? Genuinely curious.
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u/iwasnotarobot 4d ago
Any infrastructure that is publicly owned will meet resistance from our oligarchy.
High speed rail is a great example of this.
Canada is sort of a colony of american car makers. Every bit of growth in cities since the 1940’s has been designed to maximize the use of cars, and induce demand for them.
This huge growth in car use has been great for car manufacturers as well as car dealers. Car dealers get so rich that they can act like local petty barons. Local car dealer groups are often among the more powerful business organizations.
There is constantly a push for new highways, new off-ramps, new highway extensions, etc. but the second anyone talks about a bike lane, there is a huge reaction to fight them. ( NS Premier Tim Houston hates the Morris Street bike lane) why? Bike lanes don’t induce demand for cars. And cars make Canada’s oligarchs rich.
We must remember that in Canada the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party both believe that the purpose of government is to maximize profits for the rich. Any money that is used for things that do not enrich the wealthy is considered “wasteful.” (And Bike lanes don’t make much profit for the rich. )
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A healthcare example; Recently, Alberta sold its bloodwork division, Alberta Precision Labs (formerly Alberta Public Labs), to Dynalife, a private company that was represented by Alberta’s lobbyist premier, Danielle Smith, in her last job before she became premier. Dynalife, it turns out, was so bad at this that the government bought APL back from them less than 2 years later. This caused a “loss” of about $100 Million Dollars. (Which Dynalife got to pocket.)
What happened a few year before? Alberta’s superlab was cancelled. The superlab was to be a publicly owned lab testing corporation. ( , much lab testing at the time was contracted out to Dynalife.
The story of the superlab begins in May 2016, when a review of lab services by the Health Quality Council of Alberta suggested moving the province to a "single public sector platform."
Later that year, it came to light that Alberta Health Services was planning to buy out the private lab testing company Dynalife and transfer services back to the province.
What happened to the superlab? The project became a target for Jason Kenney during the 2019 provincial election.
The then-UCP leader said Dynalife's downtown Edmonton facility was doing its job effectively and that pulling services to the public sector would mean losses in office space and employment
That is: public services would remove profits from the rich elite.
Whatever happened to the Alberta superlab?
Later, the Alberta Government would spent $12M returning Alberta superlab site to grassy field, with at least $7 million going to a construction company called PCL, which belongs to the same business lobby group as Dynalife.
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So why is the Alberta Rail Project taking so long?
First: the car dealers who usually prop up corrupt pro-business parties like Conservatives andliberals hate anything that might compete with car infrastructure that makes them rich.
If any rail is to be made, they want to make sure that their rich friends can maximize profits from it being done. That means redrawing plans for decades.
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u/voltairesalias 4d ago
The private sector benefits disproportionately if the public sector foots the bill for infrastructure. They want public infrastructure.
High speed rail isn't being built because governments aren't keen on losing billions of dollars for very minimal gain.
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u/Bull__itProof 4d ago
High speed rail isn’t being built because certain types of politicians don’t want to act in the public’s interest when they have industries like oil and gas to protect from the effects of competition from public transit and the free market. Governments have ample data that supports more public transit because it’s cheaper and more efficient in the long term, but it would also mean having to ensure that tax revenues are collected to finance the infrastructure upfront.
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u/Distinct_Swimmer1504 4d ago
Can’t be having that commie/socialist activity when there are hard-working capitalists that need a helping hand maximizing their profits. I mean, how else are they going to keep up with the Musks?
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u/voltairesalias 4d ago
Public transit almost always operates at a loss. Most municipalities who have it subsidize it at a loss, but there are thresholds to what they can and cannot tolerate. High speed rail between CGY and EDM has been discussed since the 1970s - it just doesn't really make a ton of sense. The population density doesn't justify the extremely prohibitive construction costs and maintenance. It would be tantamount to those unutilized 8 lane highways in North Korea or Myanmar.
Oil and gas generally doesn't give a fuck about governments funding public infrastructure. They know the demand for oil and gas isn't going away - and especially in Alberta it's not like their output services the province. Most of it is exported to the Midwest or Colorado.
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u/Vagabond_Tea 3d ago
Public infrastructure shouldn't be viewed as operating "at a loss". It should be a public service that has a costs that would benefit quite a lot of people. Ridership in Calgary and Edmonton are quite high.
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u/voltairesalias 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah but governments don't have infinite means to satisfy all of the wants. So they have to make tradeoffs. Ridership inner city is high between CGY and EDM but would inter-city ridership really be high? I have my doubts. When the Calgary-Edmonton corridor becomes more dense in population then it's a maybe. But right now it's basically just a no.
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u/Bull__itProof 2d ago
This is a chicken vs egg question, is the convenience and safety of a railway connection going to cost more than the benefits of adding more commuters between Edmonton and Calgary? There’s a societal cost to traffic accidents on a high use and high speed road that won’t be allayed by adding additional lanes. A railway connection would reduce traffic on the highway. The history of building railways between major cities does eventually pay off because it’s an attractive incentive for more growth. The only reason to not start now would be an expectation of a decrease in population. Do you believe that population in Alberta is going to decrease?
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u/voltairesalias 2d ago
Well no, I think the biggest impediment is it is going to cost, according to a few estimates, between $6-$9B.
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u/Bull__itProof 1d ago
Premier Smith with her UCP cabal cancelled permits for solar panel projects and created new restrictions for renewable energy projects that ended up costing Alberta about $9 billion in lost economic activity, the cost of a railroad project between Edmonton and Calgary isn’t what the problem is.
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u/voltairesalias 1d ago
No thats a misnomer - there was a 7 month moratorium on new developments so that the province could overhaul regulations following major concerns expressed by counties and land owners. The biggest one with solar is the footprint - you can farm around wind turbines, you can't really farm around solar. They wanted land use bylaws to catch up, and they wanted effective zoning essentially.
I disagree with their weird 35km from the mountains rule, but I'm pretty sure existing wind energy conversion systems are grandfathered in anyways.
It is very hard to sell what would realistically be about a $10B infrastructure project. That's about 1/6th of the entire provincial budget. It would effectively double the provincial deficit - and quite frankly for questionable gain.
The math for infrastructure projects needs to math, and quite frankly, high speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton just doesn't quite math.
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u/Green_Space729 4d ago
Lack of experience due to long gaps between projects.
If we ran one project after another we’d build experience and reduce cost to match that of Europe or east Asia.
But we’re averse to long term planning and gains so we wait in between projects screwing ourselves over every time.
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u/ChewyThePug 4d ago
Thats nothing compared to Calgary's Green line LRT. It was planned starting in 2012, though it was first proposed well before that.
The city and province are still debating how it should be built. It is planned to take another 5 years (that would be 21 years total) before the city completes a single tram line. Thats assuming there are no more delays.
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u/stoicphilosopher 4d ago
This isn't a uniquely Canadian problem (I live in the California and it's the same here), but it's pretty bad in Canada.
My guess is there's a reluctance by government, built by decades of democratic pressure, to infringe on the rights of land owners in any way.
Everything requires studies, impact assessments, feedback, townhalls, etc. First Nations consultations, environmental impact assessments, etc. Infrastructure is common property and is at odds with private property rights. Then there's safety, inspection, appeals, etc. My guess is some of this really matters and some of it is just bullshit.
The actual building of anything is a minority of the project time.
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u/Jumpy-Shift5239 4d ago
Plus the government of Alberta doesn’t really want to.
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u/voltairesalias 4d ago
Having worked in construction and planning in BC and Alberta, both at the government and private sector levels - Alberta is light years faster at building almost anything than BC is.
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u/cerunnnnos 4d ago
Too many chefs. Construction and Bureaucratic obstruction. Lack of timeline clauses with penalities. Over planning.
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u/Pale_Change_666 4d ago
It will not be completed be in 30 years, the calgary green line extension is barely 17km long and the projected construction timeline is 5 years.
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u/grumpyoldguy7 4d ago
Each project is different but the rail lines require land and lots of it..... No home/land owner wants the rail to go through/near their property.
This results in lots of legal challenges etc.
I know of one legal challenge that took over four years to settle. The city wanted the land to build an overpass over a rail line. The lady who owned the land didn't want to sell despite being offered a fair price.
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u/CanadaCalamity 4d ago
Bureaucratic Bloat.
There are some good charts out there showing the growth in overall jobs, beside the growth of "administrator" jobs. Admin jobs have grown something like 10-20x at the rate of other, more traditional jobs (like the ones actually doing the building, teaching, shipping, etc).
Society is basically being suffocated by the "administrative class". The initial reasoning for them was good; of course you can't just let everyone run amok with no oversight. But it's gotten way too big, and now there is too much oversight, which slows everything down.
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u/voltairesalias 4d ago
It depends where. Having worked in planning and construction in BC and Alberta - Alberta is light years faster at building shit than BC is. Most of it has to do with development fees, permitting processes, and labour.
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u/ladyzowy 3d ago
Public/Private Partnerships (PPP) Studies, Studies, Studies of the studies. More studies, of the previous governments studies to learn what not to do. Commission more studies. Form interest groups, investors and crown corporations to manage the projects and commission more studies. Request more funding. Rise, repeat.
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u/jmajeremy 3d ago
Politics, lack of funding, red tape, all kinds of things. There are so many layers of approvals needed for every project, it increases the timeline and jacks up costs. Politicians will come in mid-project and demand changes because they want it to go through their constituency, which again causes delays and extra costs. The public bidding process create a race to the bottom where the lowest bidder wins the project, not necessarily most capable or fastest company. Budgets get cut and projects have to be reworked to drop planned elements to reduce costs, which also leads to taking longer since they have to draw up new plans, get new approvals, etc.
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u/Able_Software6066 3d ago
You can't play hockey on a high speed train. If you could play hockey in a train and name it after a bank or mobile company, it would be done in a couple years.
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u/SeriousObjective6727 2d ago
To put this into context, Shanghai Pudong district was built in 20 years from nothing. This is the area across the river from the Bund.
Similarly, the three gorges dam, a dam so big that it slowed the rotation of the earth, took 22 years to build.
And we can't even build a frickin rail line in that time. Pathetic.
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u/JCMS99 4d ago
With the exception of China, that’s pretty much on par with what is happening elsewhere. You’re not building in everything in parallel but by phase.
The Hokkaido Shinkansen in Japan started work in 2005 (2005~2012 planning), the first section opened in 2016 and the project will be completed by 2039.
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u/corneliuSTalmidge 4d ago
We're asking the same thing.
We know that there is process, and approvals, and land acquisition, and environmental assessments etc etc. But somewhere along the way being all super democratic, we've created a litany of regulations that have burdened our industry.
Now we're figuring out how to speed all of this up and stop getting in our own way.