Canada's infrastructure network needs

Because transportation infrastructure is one of the few areas of public expenditure that can be ramped up quickly when recession motivates the need to stimulate short-term employment, the recent wave of stimulus spending threatens to distract policy makers throughout the world from the more compelling question of finding a long-term framework for sustainable infrastructure investment and finance. Equally distracting, potentially, is the priority now given to reducing public sector deficits that accumulate during the fight against recession. Indeed, todays backlog in infrastructure requirements is in part the result of large cuts in infrastructure spending during the deficit fighting years in the 1980s and early 1990s.