Opinion

Last week, Manitoba’s Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Doyle Piwniuk signed an agreement with his peers in Saskatchewan and Alberta committing to work together when it comes to trade infrastructure.

In a province that has a hard time coming up with the resources to make sure some of its roadways don’t deteriorate into trails, it’s not certain just how much we might have to offer.

Obviously, transportation infrastructure is an important public issue and increasingly more serious-minded decisions are being made.

But there is the sense in some quarters that Canada may have been resting on its laurels for too long as a major trading nation with goods that other countries want and has fallen behind in investment in international trade infrastructure.

Canada used to be in the top 10 of the World Economic Forum’s ranking on transportation infrastructure. In its last such ranking in 2019, Canada had fallen to number 32 in the world.

Carlo Dade, director of the Canada West Foundation’s Trade and Investment Centre, said a recent study by European Union auditors found that Canada was the only G-20 country that did not have a system of national planning for transportation infrastructure.

“Australia, the U.K., the U.S. all do. Malaysia does. Canada does not,” said Dade.

That is why this memorandum of understanding between the three Prairie provinces — Dade said B.C. will join — is an important step to take.

“We have had this tendency to focus on the local or provincial issues at hand,” he said. “We try to fix problems: where is the roadblock? What bridge needs to be built? But the reality is even if you do that you still have a long way to go before you hit the Port of Prince Rupert or the Port of Vancouver, forget about Churchill.”

And it would be wrong for Manitoba planners to not consider west coast port access when 20 per cent of Manitoba’s exports are destined to IndoPacific markets.

In Canada, two-thirds of our GDP comes from moving good in an out of the country.

“The existential reality in Canada is that we export for a living,” said Dade. “So yes, long-term planning of the transportation infrastructure is hard. Packing up and moving is not an option.”

With new international trade deals and new tools like CGE (computable general equilibrium) modelling in place, there are ways to forecast the kind of infrastructural requirements that will result in changes to trade patterns brought about by trade deals such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

Last year, the Canada West Foundation published a report called “From Shovel Ready to Shovel Worth: The Path to a National Trade Infrastructure Plane for the Next Generation of Economic Growth” that notes confidence in the reliability and competitiveness of Canada’s trade infrastructure has been in decline at home and abroad for more than a decade.

Drilling down to regional provincial levels makes communication, which can be fostered with this kind of MOU, is important, Dade said.

For instance, Piwniuk noted in a release last week that the Manitoba government is engaged in major highway and transport investment strategies such as its $74-million investment in the Hudson Bay Railway.

While that kind of capital investment is necessary to maintain as sensitive a piece of infrastructure as the only railway connection to the Arctic Ocean, for the Port of Churchill to ever become a major ocean cargo port it will take a lot more than an investment in the maintenance of the rail line.

And it will take much more time as well.

“The project range we are talking about here is 10-to-30 years,” Dade said. “When you have that sort of long-term planning it enables thinking about things like Churchill not as a one-off but part of a long term — a generation or more — development of the country’s economy. You can start factoring in longer-terms changes, longer-term growth.”

The New West Partnership Trade Agreement between the four Western provinces could form a foundation for the kind of long-term communication required to plan trade infrastructure.

Unfortunately, public sector planning mirrors the election cycles and senior officials engaged in that sort of work are pressured by their political masters to do things that will make them look good before the next time voters go to the polls.

“Keeping the Hudson Bay Railway stable is something that can make a good sound bite. That is sellable,” said Dare.

“The longer-term investment, that the third person after you will cut the ribbon on, is a more difficult sell.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca