Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative party is not in a great position to lecture anyone about budget cuts to infrastructure spending.
The Tories underspent their infrastructure budget, including money set aside for highway maintenance, by hundreds of millions of dollars almost every year they were in office from 2016 to 2023.
Now in opposition, the Tories are criticizing the NDP government for what they claim is a cut to the highways maintenance budget. In its April 2 budget, the NDP budgeted $500 million for highways in 2024-25. That’s down from $557 million the previous year under the Tories’ last budget.
Tim Smith/The Brandon Sun Files
The Conservative provincial governments underspent their infrastructure budget by hundreds of millions of dollars almost every year they were in office from 2016 to 2023.
Trouble is, what the provincial government says it’s going to spend on infrastructure and what it ends up spending are usually two different things. The public won’t know what the province spent on infrastructure in 2023-24 until the public accounts are released in September.
If it’s anything like previous years, the Tories will have stopped well short of spending allocated amounts on capital projects, including road and highway maintenance, health facilities, schools and flood protection.
In 2022-23, the Tories budgeted $474 million for highways but spent only $429 million of that. In total, it underspent its infrastructure budget by almost $600 million ($3.2 billion budgeted, $2.6 billion spent) that year.
That played out every year, going back to 2017. So when they criticize government today for supposedly cutting highway spending, the public can take it with a grain of salt.
We won’t know how much the NDP spends on highways this year until the fiscal year is over and the audited figures are released.
There are some legitimate reasons why spending on infrastructure falls below budget. Projects can be delayed for many reasons, including supply-chain disruptions or slower-than-expected environmental assessments. What may have looked like a shovel-ready project at the beginning of a fiscal year can sometimes take longer than expected.
Still, it’s up to government to assess what is shovel-ready and what is not, and to do a better job of choosing projects that are ready to proceed. Every time a project is selected and then delayed, money is left on the table that could have been used for other pressing infrastructure projects. And there is no shortage of them.
Underspending the infrastructure budget by hundreds of millions of dollars a year has a long-term cost, not just to the state of the province’s overall infrastructure, but also to the economy. Poor highway conditions and substandard transportation routes hurt the economy which, in turn, reduces government taxation revenues.
There’s another cost to the delays. Every time highway maintenance or other infrastructure projects are pushed back, the asset in question deteriorates further. When that happens, the price to upgrade it goes up. Delaying the expansion or refurbishment of a health-care facility or school also results in higher prices down the road as material costs rise.
So while there may be short-term savings in underspending the infrastructure budget, those benefits are usually exceeded by higher future costs, including lost opportunity as a result of reduced economic activity.
The province needs to do a far better job of assessing which infrastructure projects are shovel-ready and which are not.
It should also start working on an assessment of infrastructure needs across the province. A recent report from consulting firm MNP found Manitoba was an outlier in not conducting regular assessments of its inventory. Most other Canadian jurisdictions do that so they have some idea of the cost of needed repairs. Manitoba apparently has no idea.
“We found no evidence of an all-of-government assessment of infrastructure and state-of-repair document, as exists in many other Canadian jurisdictions,” MNP wrote in its 36-page report. “A document such as this would generally provide detail on the state of repair of government-owned assets and estimate the cost to bring those assets into a state of good repair over a period.”
How can government know how much it’s supposed to spend on infrastructure if it hasn’t done that due diligence?
The Tories had seven years to fix that and failed. The new government must do better.
tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
Tom Brodbeck
Columnist
Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.