Can Canada still get things built? Yes, we can

Last week, I wrote about how quickly Canada used to build megaprojects. The National Dream went from first spike to Last Spike in three-and-a-half years. Toronto and Montreal built the first lines of their subway systems in four-and-a-half years. And Expo 67 also went from conception to completion in four-and-a-half years, and a mere 44 months from first shovel to opening day.

I contrasted that record with those of recent projects, notably in public transit, that today take far longer to build and cost many times more, even accounting for inflation. For example, the Ontario Line in Toronto has an estimated price tag of more than $1-billion a kilometre – roughly 10 times the cost of building a Toronto subway line from the 1950s to the 1990s.

And I wrote about the mayor of Longueuil, Que., who took to TikTok to express her exasperation at how mega-problems beset even micro-projects: New traffic lights are $1-million, and a speed bump – a lump of asphalt – clocks in at $10,000.

Is negative productivity – paying more, getting less, doing it more slowly – the best we can hope for? Does anyone know how to build any more?

Yes, we do.

There’s an entire world of examples of infrastructure that are as good as or better than Canada’s, built quickly, and at a fraction of the cost. These cases are almost all outside the English-speaking world. But there are also Canadian examples of infrastructure as good as or better than the rest of the country’s, built relatively quickly and cheaply.

The School of Cities at the University of Toronto recently put out a brief comparing transit construction costs in Ontario and the rest of the developed world. Its findings echo those of a report published five years ago by the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario. They are sobering reads.

From Spain to Finland, Turkey to Italy and South Korea to France, subways and other high-level transit are being built for the low prices that used to be the norm in Canada more than a generation ago.

Other countries are paying far less, which means that they can afford to build far more. We are paying more, leaving us only able to afford to build much, much less.

Open this photo in gallery:

Take Toronto’s Finch West LRT, which is being financed and overseen by Ontario and built by the private sector, and compare it with new subway lines in Finland, Turkey, South Korea and Italy. The latter are underground, high-capacity, heavy rail; Finch is light, surface rail. The foreign projects should cost several times more per kilometre than Finch. In fact, they cost about half as much.

Examples such as this abound across Europe and Asia. But they also exist in Canada. Here are three:

In 2007, Montreal completed an extension of the Metro’s Orange Line. It’s 5.2 kilometres long and entirely underground. There were cost overruns, but in hindsight the project was a relative bargain: The price was $143.3-million a kilometre. Factor in inflation and that’s $210-million a kilometre today.

That’s on par with costs in Europe and Asia, or 20th-century Canada. It’s also less than the Finch LRT, even though Montreal’s project is underground, higher capacity and passes under a river.

Or consider Vancouver’s Canada Line, part of the SkyTrain network. Opened in 2009, it’s 19.2 kilometres long and almost half is below ground. It was built in four years for $2.05-billion.

Taking inflation into account, that’s just $154-million a kilometre – roughly half the cost of the Finch LRT, and a fraction of the price for the Ontario Line, which Canada Line is similar to. It’s also a third of the cost of Vancouver’s own under-construction Broadway Subway.

Then there’s Montreal’s Réseau express métropolitain, or REM. It involves building an entire mass-transit system – 67 kilometres of track and 26 stations – in a short period of time. The first phase, between downtown and Brossard on Montreal’s South Shore, opened in 2023. Most of the rest of the network is supposed to open in the fall. It runs on elevated tracks, similar to SkyTrain, except for a portion through the centre of the city that is tunnelled.

The project has been dogged by criticism, and it is behind schedule and over budget. It was originally supposed to cost $7-billion, though last fall Quebec’s Auditor-General estimated that the final tally would be $9.4-billion.

But everything is relative: At $9.4-billion, the REM would cost just $140-million a kilometre. Even if we assume more cost overruns on the nearly complete project – let’s be hyper-pessimistic and inflate the price by another third – that’s still less than $200-million a kilometre. That’s comparable to the cost of similar transit projects in Europe and Asia, and a fraction of the cost of recent Canadian projects.

Or to look at it this way: If Toronto’s Scarborough Subway and Yonge North Subway Extension were being built at REM pricing, Ontario could afford to build four of each of them.

And if the Ontario Line were delivered at the REM’s price, Queen’s Park’s existing budget would be sufficient to finance five – yeah, five – Ontario Lines.