Feds must think long term with infrastructure

In making decisions about infrastructure which will shape people’s lives for decades, it’s essential to plan for long-term effects. And if we need to connect that principle to lived experience, the City of Regina’s familiar frustration with railway lines crossing the Ring Road between Winnipeg Street and McDonald Street offers a prime example.

It surely shouldn’t take much hindsight to point out the conflict between a high-capacity freeway and a set of rail lines which stop traffic. But the result of proceeding without accounting for that concern has been a regular and growing combination of accidents, delays and general inconvenience.

And there’s been little more than idle talk about alternatives … at least until this week.

Now, city council has finally voted to study the possibility of removing the rail lines from the city.

Hopefully the result will be to finally address a problem decades in the making. But even a best-case scenario will involve years of additional nuisance for citizens.

Moreover, our options to resolve a “critical” issue are now limited by existing driving patterns. And there’s reason for concern that the city’s main focus still seems to be on immediate cost rather than long-term functionality.

Meanwhile, in an example of the thinking we should be encouraging among our elected officials, city council also decided this week to make a much-needed move toward solar power.

For the moment, the city will be reviewing options for its own buildings, with the strategy potentially extending to all kinds of energy needs.

To be clear, Regina can’t claim to be ahead of the curve on solar power.

Past spills offer reason for skepticism that we’re ... close to having a handle on the issue.

On the contrary, it’s already fallen behind many of our neighbouring cities — to say nothing of the growing number of jurisdictions meeting substantial parts of their overall energy needs through new renewables. And it will again take years before today’s discussion might lead to action.

But at the very least, our city council is examining how to get on board with a changing energy environment.

And that makes for a stark contrast against the private infrastructure receiving so much attention at the provincial and federal levels.

Provincial and federal governments of multiple political stripes are using threats and inducements to lock us into massive pipeline projects to transport diluted bitumen — even where the risks involve a remarkable mix of uncertainty and obsolescence.

On the uncertainty side, the federal government has only recently and reluctantly acknowledged that there’s still a glaring information gap in responding to major spills of diluted bitumen. And past spills offer reason for skepticism that we’re anywhere close to having a handle on the issue.

It may then be true that Canada’s response to the issue will be “world-leading.” But if so, that’s only because nobody else is willing to wager public money on the hope of developing some future response capability before predictable disaster strikes.

Meanwhile, the global push away from fossil fuels also means that a new pipeline may prove obsolete within its lifespan. And it’s hardly a desirable result if relatively dirty and expensive oil gets produced at a loss simply because producers have committed to paying for their pipeline capacity anyway.

So in the pursuit of marginal price gains in the short term, new or expanded pipelines will create avoidable environmental hazards, while locking us into the production of harmful products past the point when the rest of the world has moved on. And if the push for new pipelines succeeds, it’s all too likely that decades down the road, we’ll be left asking why we didn’t pay more attention to foreseeable realities.