How much does Ottawa spend on highways and roads?
With all the recent buzz about the federal government’s role in funding highway and road infrastructure, I got curious and decided to look at just how much Ottawa actually spends on these projects. By crunching some numbers from Infrastructure Canada’s project list data, I found that highway and road project funding is comparatively low and has actually been falling for the past half-decade.
The bulk of INFC’s contributions to highway and road projects in the past decade resulted from the New Canada Building Fund, a 10-year infrastructure plan announced in Budget 2013. Federal road project investments fell by 90% when the Harper-era funding was fully distributed and then replaced by the Trudeau-era Investing in Canadian Infrastructure Program (ICIP).
Many of these projects did not aim to enlarge or create road networks, but rather rehabilitate existing ones. Rather than fund big urban highway projects, virtually all of the federal ICIP contributions for highway and road projects were distributed through the program’s Rural and Northern Infrastructure Stream. Of the ten largest highway and road projects funded through ICIP, four are situated in the territories and two are situated in First Nations.
For the better part of a decade, federal funding for public and active transportation has routinely outpaced funding for highways and roads. With the Permanent Public Transit Fund set to begin in 2026, it is clear that the envelope for highway funding was not likely to grow much, if at all.
As a note, highway and road projects can also be funded through other federal mechanisms like Transport Canada’s National Trade Corridors Fund (NTCF) or the $2.4 billion that gets allocated each year to local governments through the Canada Community-Building Fund (CCBF), but those programs would likely not skew the numbers too much. The NTCF intends to distribute $4.6 billion over 11 years to tackle all sorts of trade corridor issues, such as climate adaptation, technological innovation, and northern accessibility. Even if all of the funds were somehow funnelled into road network enlargement, the total would have never exceeded $420 million a year in federal funding.
The CCBF acts as a sort of per capita allocation to address local infrastructure needs. Although road network enlargement is an eligible cost, it ends up competing with a whole myriad of spending priorities relating to public transit, water infrastructure, and asset management practices to ensure that existing infrastructure (yes, including the road network) is in a good state of repair.
That is not to say road network enlargement is not happening — there are several examples from coast to coast. Just last week, the Government of Nova Scotia presented details on its 2024–25 capital plan. The plan aims to spend “$483.3 million for projects outlined in the Five-Year Highway Improvement Plan.” Nearly a third of the province’s capital funding this year will go to projects like the upgrading and twinning of major highways and interchanges.
Provincial priorities notwithstanding, I have prepared a table which shows all of the highway and road projects which have received federal contributions through INFC application programs since 2002. It is obviously not the full picture, but hopefully, it will show where federal money generally gets spent on roads (mostly rural and northern communities), what types of projects get funding (mostly a mix of upgrades and rehabilitation), and how much gets contributed (an ever-declining amount). Happy number crunching!
