Asphalt and pork

A proposal that Prime Minister Jean Chrtien should show off his vision and make an indelible stamp on the country by launching a program to twin the main route of the Trans-Canada Highway, at a cost upward of $10 billion, made the rounds a short time ago.

There are obvious political motives behind the proposal, which cynics see as an offer of a monument that would allow the increasingly vilified Prime Minister to ride quietly into the political sunset. Still, it’s real money on something that is, for this government, an unusually concrete idea. So it’s worth considering the costs and benefits of a road program.

There was a day that the national government really did spend money on roads. Northern Miners from the 1940s and 50s are full of stories about the progress of road construction — frequently nationally funded — in the north, and the impact those roads would have on mining projects. For the mining industry and for the general economy, roads are good, and good roads are better: full stop.

This newspaper has traditionally supported that kind of infrastructure spending, but we have good reason to believe that in the old days things actually got built. The danger these days is that governments are less punctilious than they used to be about doing what they say they are going to do. Billions for roads might be worthwhile; billions for no roads might be a bit of a boondoggle.

Along with the proposal for road building came a trial balloon for a $3-billion program to upgrade rail lines. That was, of course, greeted with enthusiasm by the Railway Association of Canada, the industry’s lobby group.

Subsidies to build rail are not new, though we suspect the Railways Association might be cooler to some of the things that came in trade for rail subsidies in the past, like regulated freight rates through Crowsnest Pass. In a program like that, the taxpayer puts up money for infrastructure that does not belong to the public. He ought to get full value in return, because redistribution of wealth is not a particularly noble idea when the flow is from taxpayer to shareholder.

If the government really wants to modernize ground transportation in this country, it could do those things that make integrated container transport work better: roads to rail, and modern container ports, rather than taxpayer-funded improvements to privately owned rails. That, or take over the rails and charge trackage, a model that holds the seeds of a first-class financial disaster.

Some of the talk of infrastructure spending by the national government brings to mind the departed Brian Tobin’s ambition to be the C.D. Howe of Internet access (and indeed, the government’s Strategic Infrastructure Fund, pumped full of cash in the last budget, includes taxpayer-funded expansion of high-speed Internet access as a subsidy to those who just can’t stand the wait on dialup). That in itself provides some useful signals about where the taxpayer and his sleepy agents in Parliament should draw the line.

Putting infrastructure where it belongs is one of the better kinds of central economic planning, but sloshing around public money in haphazard imitation of a mildly socialist industrial strategy will merely be a waste: dirigisme, madly and in all directions. In short, if taxpayers are to build roads, let it be in response to need, not in fulfilment of some mystical vision. And let’s not distract ourselves with some grand plan for the future riding the back of a road-building fund.

We can see there may be good arguments for expansion of the cross-country road network, but twinning the Trans-Canada is not the only model to pursue. Building new alternate routes and upgrading existing ones (such as the northern provincial highways in Ontario and Quebec, and the Yellowhead route through the west) might take traffic pressure off the Trans-Canada, with significant strategic benefits at times when accidents and natural disasters affect the main east-west route. Other highways, like the Trans-Labrador and an all-weather route through the Kitikmeot region, would serve economic needs that could never be addressed by a big-money twinning program on the southern highway.

At the bottom, there is just one question: is an intelligent program of road construction likely to happen under the present national government, billions or no billions?

On that score the present government’s history in the infrastructure business is not reassuring. In 1993, the Liberal Party made a $6-billion program to upgrade basic infrastructure a major part of its “Red Book” of election promises. But once the Liberals were in power, the $6 billion went heavily into local building schemes, such as convention centres, rather than into roads and bridges, sewers and waterworks.

To take one example, the idea of twinning Highway 17 — the Trans-Canada link in northern Ontario — had already been floated by the Rae government in Ontario when the Liberals came to power nationally. Neither government acted on the need then. Readers are forgiven for concluding neither was serious.

Pinned to that history is the innate Liberal compulsion to turn any and all spending into carrots and sticks. One can legitimately fear that a Trans-Canada Highway twinned by Liberals would consist of a well-lit series of passing lanes through Liberal ridings, merging abruptly into a narrow two-lane blacktop each time it entered enemy turf.

And tied to the tail of patronage is another rattling tin can: the Liberal Party badly wants to see the man it sustains in government go quietly out the door so that the next election won’t be a lynching. The Liberals have been dissected by internal power struggles that call to mind the internecine battles of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s (not least because of this country’s growing resemblance to a one-party state). While the governing party could wear a mask of unity in public, it had no need to offer its leader an enticement to leave. Now that the succession battle has erupted, publicly and embarrassingly, the cabinet and the party establishment clearly hope to bring about a transfer of power that won’t leave the party looking even worse to the voters than the comic-opera Alliance and the gutted Conservatives.

But since Laurier, outgoing Liberal prime ministers have always been adroit at rewarding loyal servants as they made their way out the door at Sussex Drive. The present one has so much experience at pork-barrel politics, and such a nicely cultivated sense of vengeance, that he would be certain to follow the old, bad pattern. A multi-billion-dollar war chest for that sort of thing is just what he would need to savage the public purse as a last thank-you gesture to the electorate and the taxpayers.