The fact that the City of Ottawa, the capital of the country, was deemed “[un]fit to oversee such massive infrastructure projects” should really give people pause.

Ottawa is a small, tiny city. It takes a great deal of institutional knowledge and competence to deliver a large transit project. I doubt Ottawa had the capability.

It really makes me question the ability of this country to do anything meaningful or systemic to improve our urban infrastructure that the capital city of the country couldn’t even build one small train system. Countries like China have been able to build entire subway systems in the past 20 years on top of a nationally connected high speed rail network. In Japan you can get between major cities like Osaka and Tokyo in as little as an hour, whereas the same distance in Canada (roughly Montreal to Toronto) takes four to five times longer. Like what the hell are we doing that it’s this complicated to get anything done?

Ontario is delivering one of the largest urban infrastructure plans anywhere in the world. Toronto alone has dozens of concurrent infrastructure projects, worth tens or billions of dollars under construction as we have this conversation.

We clearly have the capability to deliver infrastructure when we deem necessary. We just need more popular support to get these things built. Let’s not have an unnecessarily defeatist attitude.