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?