RC120 SeptOct 2025 - Magazine - Page 14
RENEW CANADA 20TH ANNIVERSARY
““As it turned out, our surveys show that prioritizing kids over cars
was the best infrastructure investment we could have made.”
essential condition for creating and sustaining
the quality of life that Canadians have come
to expect. But—and this is key—the Prime
Minister refuses to talks about infrastructure
in isolation from the needs of the people who
bene昀椀t from its creation.
The past 20 years have given ReNew Canada
and its diverse readership a unique perspective on what it means to be in the infrastructure business.
My research has identi昀椀ed three positive
interconnected trends:
The definition of what constitutes “infrastructure” continues to expand
Today, even though huge capital dollars
expended on traditional “hard” infrastructure
such as pipelines, railways, roads, bridges
and transit consistently put such projects at
the top of capital investment league tables,
today’s political calculus has expanded to include the many additional but essential “hard
infrastructure” elements required to support
“soft infrastructure” the services increasingly seen as essential to sustaining a vibrant
knowledge economy. Examples include information and communication infrastructure
(think 5G broadband, 昀椀bre optics, satellites,
and, more recently, a new breed of facilities
to power AI-driven data centres) as well as
investments in STEM-focused schools, universities and colleges required to educate our
future workforce. The range of investments
classi昀椀ed as “community-supportive soft
infrastructure” also includes healthcare assets
such as hospitals, and even daycare facilities.
When Gordon Harris, former president and
CEO of UniverCity, a sustainable community
built on top of Burnaby Mountain adjacent to
Simon Fraser University, and his team were
looking for ways to attract future residents,
including top academics with young children,
14—RENEW CANADA – SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2025
he scrapped plans for a multi-storey car park
and created instead a “state of the art daycare”
that “promoted a sense of belonging within
the community.” Harris also pressed the local
school board and province to accelerate the
construction of an elementary school to ensure
that young families could grow with the community (which, by the way, would also bene昀椀t
from construction of a district energy plant run
as a utility by Corix).
“Our priorities for building community were
all about o昀昀ering an incomparable quality of
life of young families, many of whom would be
working or studying at the university,” Harris
recalls. “As it turned out, our surveys show
that prioritizing kids over cars was the best infrastructure investment we could have made.”
The lines between public and private
responsibility for infrastructure continue to
blur—and that’s a good thing
Innovative new models of project governance
and funding relying on collaboration involving
crown corporations, the private sector, pension funds, and, increasingly, Indigenous-led
partnerships—are re-shaping the investment
landscape at the community scale. More often
than not, the institutional glue holding a project’s diverse pieces together is determined by
decisions on how to deliver carbon-free or low
carbon energy.
As a result, the lines between sectors have
been blurring, as old-school assumptions
about whose responsibility it is to provide
“necessary infrastructure” are slowly being
erased. A feature of projects where the common
denominator is a commitment to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions is that di昀昀erent
combinations of “lead actors” are 昀椀nding ways
to blend corporate and institutional goals with
public sector aspirations, leading to better
policy outcomes.
RENEWCANADA.NET
