Is urban flooding becoming a more pressing threat as Canada's infrastructure ages?
CBC
After multiple water main breaks and floods across the country this summer, municipalities and experts are warning that urban flooding could become more common as Canada's infrastructure ages.
"We have good infrastructure in Canada. The challenge is it's aging and we're not keeping up," John Gamble, president of the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies of Canada, told CBC News.
A major water main break in Montreal on Friday triggered flooding and a boil water advisory — just the latest in a string of infrastructure failures that have happened in recent months.
In June, Calgary declared a state of local emergency and called on residents to cut their water consumption after the city's main water feeder pipe failed.
A major storm that caused massive floods in the streets of Toronto last month raised questions about whether city infrastructure is built to withstand heavy rainfall. Vancouver experienced its own, less severe flooding in June, after a sewer main broke in the Olympic Village.
"Sadly, we're going to see more of this instead of less ... unless there's a real full-press effort to proactively address some of the infrastructure challenges in this country," Gamble said.
In June, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) called on all three levels of government to convene a meeting to discuss threats facing municipalities, including crumbling infrastructure.
"Municipalities own approximately 60 per cent of the infrastructure in this country and yet when it comes to taxes, we get less. Eight to 10 cents of every dollar tax dollar that's collected goes to municipalities," Geoff Stewart, president of the FCM, told CBC News.
Stewart said the funding model for municipal infrastructure maintenance is badly outdated and hasn't accounted for factors like rapid population growth and climate change.
"It was never designed to deal with this massive infrastructure that we have. It was never designed to deal with climate change and climate adaptation and all these things. And it's putting a very heavy burden on municipalities," he said.
Mary Rowe, president of the Canadian Urban Institute, agreed that infrastructure maintenance is an unfair burden for municipalities.
"I think the dilemma that we have in this country is that we have a funding system that puts municipal governments at the very end of the pipe," she said. "They basically get whatever filters down to them."
One issue facing municipalities, Gamble said, is the fact that their water infrastructure was built using flood data that is now out of date due to climate change.
"As we've seen in recent years, we can no longer blindly rely on that," he said.
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