Eastern spending trumpeted
A National Post analysis of the federal government’s infrastructure spending shows that while the money has been distributed fairly evenly across the country, government announcements promoting the infrastructure program have overwhelmingly concentrated on the dollars spent in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces.
Of the 82 press releases issued during the summer about the government’s 12-year, $180-billion infrastructure plan, 76 per cent were related to projects east of Ontario, where there are obvious electoral implications for the governing party.
While Quebec accounted for just 16 per cent of the total funding distributed through the Investing in Canada plan by the end of summer, it was home to 43 per cent of the actual inperson infrastructure announcements, often with the minister of infrastructure in attendance.
Many of the funding announcements in Quebec were for relatively small projects: for example, local MP Stéphane Lauzon duly turned up for a press conference on July 10 in SaintSixte, a town of a few hundred in the Outaouais, to announce the relatively small expenditure of $10,000 for playground equipment.
In Quebec, 25 of the 35 public announcements made were for projects where the federal government was spending under $1 million. In an interview, infrastructure minister François-Philippe Champagne said that was a deliberate strategy.
“It’s not always about big projects. As minister of infrastructure I insisted that my first announcement was $10,000. That’s probably the smallest investment attended by a minister of infrastructure in Canada. The reason why I did that is because a small investment in a small community can have a big impact,” said Champagne.
On July 27, Champagne was on hand to pledge $10,000 to repaint the roof and install external lighting of a rectory in Batiscan, Que.
There was a higher bar in British Columbia, however, where all summer only two projects were considered significant enough to announce to the parliamentary press gallery. In June, the government touted $167 million in road and rail infrastructure for the Port of Vancouver and $6.3 million in improvements at the Nanaimo Port Authority.
Tallying up total spending by province shows that Quebec is actually receiving much less than the provincial average of infrastructure money. While the province accounts for 23 per cent of the country’s population, it received only 16 per cent of the total funding.
Alberta has one of the highest per-capita dollar amounts thanks to substantial light rail projects. Only the territories, P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador, where the per-capita numbers are slightly skewed due to tiny populations, rank higher than Alberta’s $764 per person.