President Obama has proposed the creation of a US $4B “national-infrastructure fund” in an effort to get away from “the federal government’s traditional approach of giving grants to specific states and localities for infrastructure spending”: WSJ.
At least one well-known American construction attorney, John Ahlers, thinks that the fund is a good idea, providing of course that it is properly managed.
It seems like a sensible idea to me too for financing similar types of large-scale infrastructure projects.
I immediately wondered how something like that would work in Canada. Although our constitutional structure would change the character of a project like that to some extent, would a similar institution in fact encourage interprovincial collaboration on, say, a high speed rail link or improved energy infrastructure? What’s the closest thing we have to a Canadian analogue at the moment? Are there any reasons why this wouldn’t work or else would not yield any significant benefits?
Proposed National Infrastructure Bank for US
President Obama has proposed the creation of a US $4B “national-infrastructure fund” in an effort to get away from “the federal government’s traditional approach of giving grants to specific states and localities for infrastructure spending”: WSJ.
At least one well-known American construction attorney, John Ahlers, thinks that the fund is a good idea, providing of course that it is properly managed.
It seems like a sensible idea to me too for financing similar types of large-scale infrastructure projects.
I immediately wondered how something like that would work in Canada. Although our constitutional structure would change the character of a project like that to some extent, would a similar institution in fact encourage interprovincial collaboration on, say, a high speed rail link or improved energy infrastructure? What’s the closest thing we have to a Canadian analogue at the moment? Are there any reasons why this wouldn’t work or else would not yield any significant benefits?