Build Canada? And Potholes!
When a Pothole Is Not Just a Pothole
An inquiry into small-town infrastructure, local roads, and Canada’s nation-building imagination
Every spring, potholes return to small-town Canada like an annual audit. They expose not only what winter has done to asphalt, but perhaps what decades of fiscal design have done to local government.
The easy explanation is familiar: town roads are bad because towns do not spend enough on them. But what if the harder explanation is closer to the truth? What if many small towns simply cannot spend enough — not without raising property taxes beyond what residents will tolerate, starving other services, or waiting for grants that rarely match the slow, unglamorous rhythm of infrastructure renewal?
This article begins with a hypothesis: that poor roads in small-town Canada are not merely a maintenance failure. They may be evidence of a deeper structural mismatch between local infrastructure responsibility and local fiscal capacity.
In Antigonish, this is not an abstract debate. Residents know the feeling of moving from a main street or neighbourhood street onto a patched, uneven, or weather-worn section of road and wondering why basic local infrastructure seems so hard to keep up.
The frustration is real. But perhaps the explanation is bigger than one budget year, one council decision, or one bad winter.
The first hypothesis: local responsibility has outgrown local revenue
Canada’s local and regional governments carry a very large share of the country’s infrastructure responsibility. Statistics Canada reported that, at the end of 2022, transportation and water infrastructure in Canada had a replacement value of $2.6 trillion, and local and regional governments were responsible for 72% of it.
They also owned 64% of the replacement value of roads, 76% of public transit assets, and 82% of active transportation infrastructure.
That raises the first question: have we given municipalities revenue tools equal to the infrastructure responsibilities we expect them to carry?
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has long argued that municipalities maintain roughly 60% of Canada’s essential public infrastructure, while receiving only a small share of every tax dollar. Academic work on municipal infrastructure finance has made similar arguments for years.
Almos Tassonyi and Brian Conger’s research on municipal capacity to finance capital infrastructure notes that municipal governments own and maintain a very large share of Canada’s public infrastructure, but their limited taxation and financing powers constrain their ability to invest adequately.
Enid Slack and Almos Tassonyi’s work on urban infrastructure finance similarly asks a central question: who should pay when municipal infrastructure benefits are local, regional, and national at the same time?
Antigonish sits squarely inside this national question. The Town is expected to maintain the visible infrastructure of daily life — streets, sidewalks, drainage, water, sewer, public spaces, and local access — while relying heavily on a small-town tax base.
That is a very different fiscal reality from the province or federal government, both of which have broader revenue tools and larger borrowing capacity.
So the first hypothesis is this: small towns may not simply be underperforming on infrastructure. They may be operating inside a fiscal architecture that makes chronic underinvestment likely.
The renewal gap is no longer abstract
The evidence suggests this is not just a local complaint. Statistics Canada reported in 2025 that infrastructure owners estimated $294.4 billion was required, as of the end of 2022, to rehabilitate or replace existing core public infrastructure so it could be brought to, or maintained in, good condition.
Actual renewal spending in 2022 was only $31.3 billion, about 11% of the required renewal budgets.
Transportation infrastructure — roads, bridges, tunnels, active transportation, and public transit — accounted for 55% of the required renewal budget.
Rural municipalities were in an even harder position: while rural areas had less than one-fifth of Canada’s population, they accounted for almost one-third of municipal required renewal budgets.
This raises a second question: if rural and small-town infrastructure needs are disproportionate to population size, should funding formulas based heavily on population be considered adequate?
Small towns are structurally exposed. Their roads, sidewalks, culverts, stormwater systems, water lines, sewer lines, recreation facilities, fire halls, and community buildings age like infrastructure anywhere else. But the tax base underneath them is thinner.
Property tax is visible, politically painful, and does not grow with the economy in the way income tax, sales tax, or corporate tax can.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities’ Municipal Growth Framework paper argues that municipalities remain heavily dependent on property taxes even as they fund a wider range of services, and that local governments have limited fiscal and political room to raise more from property taxpayers.
So perhaps the small-town road problem is not just that pavement breaks. Pavement always breaks.
The deeper issue may be that roads break on a lifecycle schedule, while municipal revenues arrive on a political schedule. Councils can patch. They can delay. They can bundle one street into a larger capital project. They can wait for a grant.
But the road base, drainage, asphalt, curb, sidewalk, and buried infrastructure do not wait.
Antigonish shows the problem in miniature. A local street is not just asphalt. It may carry water lines, sewer lines, stormwater, sidewalks, curbs, school traffic, emergency access, seniors walking to appointments, students moving between campus and town, and residents trying to reach Main Street, the hospital, the library, local shops, and community services.
When a street deteriorates, the issue is not simply a pothole. It may be the slow fraying of the infrastructure that holds everyday town life together.
The second hypothesis: Nova Scotia has its own road trap
Nova Scotia adds a second, more specific question.
Is the small-town road problem in Nova Scotia made worse by the province’s unusual road-governance structure?
Unlike much of Canada, Nova Scotia has a peculiar division of road responsibility. In most of Canada, local roads are mainly municipal. But Nova Scotia has a much larger share of provincially owned local roads.
Provincial statistics, drawing on Statistics Canada infrastructure data, reported that in 2018 provincially owned local roads accounted for more than half of all public roadway in Nova Scotia, compared with only 4.7% nationally.
Municipally owned local roads accounted for only 9.8% of all roads in Nova Scotia.
At first glance, this might seem like it should help towns. If the province owns many local roads, surely towns have less to maintain.
But the reality appears messier.
Nova Scotia’s road responsibilities are historically tangled. The Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities has described roads as one of the most significant fiscal inequalities between towns and rural municipalities.
Its 2018 road-funding resolution noted that rural local roads were assumed by the province under the 1994 Service Exchange Agreement, while towns and former towns continued to raise concerns about the lack of funding for arterial and collector roads within their boundaries.
The same document leaves room for interpretation around responsibility for roads, drainage, curbs, gutters, and sidewalks.
That is the Nova Scotia twist: the road may feel local, but responsibility may be provincial, municipal, or shared.
A resident sees a pothole. A town sees a jurisdictional map. The province sees a 23,000-kilometre road network. The road does not care who owns it; it simply deteriorates.
Antigonish residents may experience this confusion in practical ways. Some roads feel like part of the town’s daily fabric even when responsibility may sit partly or wholly elsewhere.
That makes public accountability difficult. People naturally bring their frustration to the local level, but the power and budget to act may not always sit neatly with the Town.
So the second hypothesis is this: Nova Scotia small towns may face not only the general Canadian municipal infrastructure squeeze, but also a specific provincial road-governance problem.
A town street is not a miniature highway
The province’s own scale is enormous. Nova Scotia’s 2026–27 Five-Year Highway Improvement Plan says the provincial system includes more than 23,000 kilometres of roads and highways and about 4,100 bridges.
The 2026–27 capital program is approximately $465 million, with more than 160 highway improvement projects.
It also notes that about 35% of provincial roads — more than 8,400 kilometres — are gravel, requiring drainage, structure, and durability work.
But a town street is not simply a miniature highway.
A town street is a more complicated public asset. It carries cars, pedestrians, seniors, children, delivery trucks, snowbanks, sidewalks, parking, school traffic, emergency vehicles, stormwater, underground water and sewer lines, lighting, accessibility requirements, and neighbourhood life.
A provincial road is often treated primarily as a transportation corridor. A town street is a corridor, a utility trench, a drainage system, a walking route, and a civic space.
This is exactly how the issue shows up in Antigonish. A street project is rarely only about asphalt.
It may involve sidewalks, curbs, drainage, buried pipes, accessibility, snow clearing, and how people move between homes, schools, shops, StFX, the hospital, the library, churches, and community services.
The street is not just a surface. It is part of the town’s everyday social and economic system.
This is why road comparisons can be misleading. If a town spends money on a street, is it road spending? Sidewalk spending? Stormwater spending? Sewer spending? Accessibility spending? Active transportation spending?
The answer is often: all of the above.
When a small town “fixes a road,” it may be renewing an entire street corridor.
The third hypothesis: Build Canada may be big, but is it deep enough?
This brings us to the third question: whether Canada’s new building agenda is big enough — or whether it misses this basic point.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has launched the Build Communities Strong Fund, a $51 billion program over ten years, beginning in 2026–27, with $3 billion per year ongoing.
It is intended to support infrastructure related to economic prosperity, housing, education, health, transit, and climate adaptation.
The fund includes a $27.8 billion Community stream, formerly the Canada Community-Building Fund, to support local infrastructure priorities.
The federal launch also announced a provincial and territorial stream, a direct delivery stream, and a requirement that at least 20% of provincial and territorial allocations go to rural, northern, and Indigenous communities.
Nova Scotia’s provincial/territorial allocation was listed at $542 million.
To be fair, local roads are not excluded.
The federal fund explicitly lists housing-related infrastructure including roads, and the Community stream allows local infrastructure priorities. The Canada Community-Building Fund has long included “local roads and bridges” as an eligible category, including construction, material enhancement, or renewal of roads, bridges, tunnels, and active transportation infrastructure.
Nova Scotia’s own Canada Community-Building Fund page also lists local roads and bridges as eligible infrastructure.
So the critique cannot be that Ottawa does not know roads are infrastructure. It does.
The sharper question is whether Canada’s infrastructure imagination still leans too heavily toward building more than renewing, toward projects more than systems, and toward growth-enabling infrastructure more than lifecycle maintenance.
Even the Community stream, while more flexible and predictable than many grant programs, generally funds infrastructure construction, renewal, or material enhancement. Routine repair and maintenance costs are typically ineligible, though upgrades are eligible.
That distinction matters.
The work that saves roads is often boring and preventive: crack sealing, drainage correction, shoulder work, culvert replacement, resurfacing before failure, and systematic lifecycle renewal.
But funding programs often reward larger, nameable projects.
A town can sometimes get help for a major street reconstruction, an active transportation corridor, a water or wastewater upgrade, or a climate-resilience project.
It may be much harder to secure enough flexible money for the ordinary annual work that prevents streets from collapsing into those larger projects in the first place.
This is where Mr. Carney’s “Build Canada” ambition may be both necessary and yet not sufficient.
Canada does need ports, housing-enabling infrastructure, clean power, hospitals, transit, major corridors, data infrastructure, and nationally significant projects. The Building Canada Act is explicitly focused on accelerating major projects such as ports, railways, energy corridors, critical minerals, and clean energy initiatives.
That is a legitimate national agenda.
But is it ambitious and visionary enough?
A country is not, and cannot be, built only on major projects. At its core, it is held together by the local streets that allow people to reach work, school, care, groceries, neighbours, and emergency services.
If these streets decay, small towns decay with them.
Housing cannot be built where roads, water, wastewater, stormwater, and local access are failing. Economic development cannot thrive where basic local infrastructure is visibly declining.
Aging communities cannot remain livable if sidewalks, streets, drainage, and crossings are treated as secondary.
In Antigonish, that means the streets people use to reach Main Street, the hospital, schools, StFX, the People’s Place Library, local businesses, seniors’ services, recreation, and neighbourhoods.
These are not nationally famous corridors. But they are the infrastructure of everyday life.
So perhaps the question is not whether Canada is thinking big enough. It is whether Canada is thinking widely and deeply enough — whether national ambition can see the small-town infrastructure systems that quietly hold the country together.
A nation-building agenda that ignores local renewal may build shiny new assets on top of tired old systems.
It may announce major projects while small towns quietly fall behind.
It may fund growth, but not always the maintenance of the places where people already live and experience those potholes — deeper and everywhere.
The pothole, then, is not a trivial complaint. It is a reality of everyday life for everyday Canadians.
It shows what may happen when responsibility and revenue do not match; when roads are treated as local annoyances rather than national productivity and livability assets; when grants prefer projects over lifecycle stewardship; and when small towns are asked to maintain modern infrastructure with fiscal tools that were never designed for the job.
Perhaps there is still time to pivot and reframe the ambition of Build Canada.
Three practical possible ways forward
1. Small Communities Infrastructure Renewal Transfers
Canada and the provinces can create a dedicated, formula-based, fairer transfer for small municipalities focused on lifecycle renewal of existing infrastructure — roads, sidewalks, culverts, stormwater, water, wastewater, and bridges.
This should be separate from competitive grant programs. It should be predictable for ten years, indexed to construction-cost inflation, and weighted by asset length, condition, rurality, climate exposure, and fiscal capacity.
This would respond directly to Statistics Canada’s finding that rural municipalities account for a disproportionate share of required renewal budgets relative to population. It would also recognize that small towns cannot plan long-term renewal from short-term grant uncertainty.
2. Realign Road Responsibility and Funding Compact
Nova Scotia should negotiate a new road compact with municipalities, especially towns and former towns, to clarify responsibility for local, collector, arterial, J-class, drainage, curbs, gutters, sidewalks, and street-corridor assets.
The Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities has already identified road responsibility and funding as a major fiscal inequality and noted the lack of clarity around road-related infrastructure.
The compact can include a public road-ownership map, centreline-kilometre and lane-kilometre inventories, condition ratings, per-kilometre renewal targets, and a more pragmatic and fairer cost-sharing formula for streets that function as regional connectors, truck routes, school routes, hospital routes, or climate-vulnerable corridors.
For a town like Antigonish, such a compact would help answer basic public questions: which roads are Town-owned, which are provincially or county-owned, which function as regional connectors, and how should costs be shared when a street serves both local residents and wider county or regional traffic?
Without this clarity, towns will remain stuck between public expectations, dependency of federal and provincial annual allocations, and disproportionate jurisdiction responsibilities.
3. Treat local road renewal infrastructure
Federal and provincial programs can explicitly score local road and street-corridor renewal as core enabling infrastructure when it supports housing, emergency access, health-care access, school access, active transportation, flood resilience, or main-street economic life.
Local roads are formally eligible in existing programs, but the policy framing often makes them feel secondary unless tied to a larger named, often shiny project.
The Build Communities Strong Fund already recognizes roads as part of housing-related infrastructure and local infrastructure priorities; the next step is to make small-town lifecycle renewal a central, core outcome, not a leftover or fringe appendage.
The test could be rather simple: if a road, culvert, sidewalk, stormwater system, or street corridor is necessary for housing, care, local business, climate resilience, or everyday mobility, then it is not “just a local road.”
It is foundational infrastructure.
When residents and businesses spend $1000s in cars and vehicle maintenance - the cost to nation comes out in the wash regardless. Not to mention the accidents and safety hazards potholes pose. That is when potholes are not just potholes. They remind us of our everyday boring requirements. Let’s make potholes sexy again!
* this article is based on limited research and borrows from several sources listed below.
References / Sources Consulted
Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Core Public Infrastructure Survey: Replacement values, 2022,” The Daily, October 21, 2024.
Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Core Public Infrastructure Survey: Required renewal budgets, 2022,” The Daily, June 24, 2025.
Federation of Canadian Municipalities, “Infrastructure” and “The Community Stream of the Build Communities Strong Fund.”
Almos Tassonyi and Brian Conger, “An Exploration into the Municipal Capacity to Finance Capital Infrastructure,” University of Calgary School of Public Policy, 2015.
Enid Slack and Almos Tassonyi, “Financing Urban Infrastructure in Canada: Who Should Pay?” Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance, 2017.
Government of Nova Scotia, Department of Finance and Treasury Board, “Infrastructure: Roads and Bridges, 2018” and “Infrastructure: Roads and Bridges, 2020.”
Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, “Resolution 3: Road Funding,” 2018.
Government of Nova Scotia, Five-Year Highway Improvement Plan 2026–27.
Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada, “Build Communities Strong Fund,” 2026.
Prime Minister of Canada, “Prime Minister Carney launches the Build Communities Strong Fund,” April 7, 2026.
Canada Community-Building Fund, “Local Roads & Bridges.”
Town of Antigonish, 2026–2027 Municipal Budget and Capital Budget materials, including West Street/James Street and Bay Street project pages.