“The greatest success of infrastructure is that we rarely notice it. The greatest failure is waiting until it breaks before remembering what it was worth.” – MJ Martin
The Systems Beneath Canadian Life
Canadians wake each morning and turn on a tap, switch on a light, flush a toilet, connect to a cellular network and drive across roads and bridges without giving much thought to what makes any of it possible. That is actually a remarkable compliment to our infrastructure. When infrastructure works properly, it disappears.
The paradox is that reliability can create complacency. A watermain that quietly delivers drinking water for 75 years receives little attention. A watermain that breaks and floods a street becomes front-page news.
Infrastructure is much like the circulatory system of the human body. We rarely think about our arteries when blood is flowing normally. Block one of them, however, and nothing else matters.
Canada Owns an Enormous Machine
The scale is difficult to comprehend. Statistics Canada reported that Canada’s transportation and water infrastructure alone had a replacement value of approximately $2.6 trillion at the end of 2022, with local and regional governments responsible for roughly 72 percent of those assets. (Statistics Canada)
Municipalities therefore operate one of the largest collections of physical assets in the country while simultaneously facing intense pressure to restrain taxes.
The Federation of Canadian Municipalities estimated Canada’s infrastructure deficit at approximately $270 billion in 2025 and notes that local governments own more than 60 percent of Canada’s core public infrastructure while receiving only a small portion of overall tax revenues. (Federation of Canadian Municipalities)
That imbalance matters because pipes, bridges and roads do not care about election cycles.
Maintenance Is Not Politically Exciting
There is a natural preference for cutting ribbons instead of replacing buried pipes. A new recreation centre can be photographed. Preventive maintenance on a sewer cannot.
Yet the economics strongly favour intervention before failure. The Canadian Infrastructure Report Card demonstrated the principle with an asset deterioration curve showing that spending a dollar on preservation at the appropriate stage can delay or eliminate several dollars of later rehabilitation or reconstruction. The same report found significant portions of Canada’s water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure already rated fair, poor or very poor. (Canadian Infrastructure)
Waiting for failure is therefore not fiscal discipline. In many cases, it is simply borrowing money from the future at an extraordinarily high interest rate.
Climate Raises the Stakes
Canada’s infrastructure must now withstand conditions that many assets were never designed to experience. The Canadian Climate Institute reports that roughly 14 percent of roads, bridges, storm sewers and water treatment systems are already in poor condition or worse. Its 2026 analysis estimates that proactive adaptation investments could save governments between approximately $4.1 billion and $8.6 billion annually in future infrastructure maintenance and replacement costs. (Canadian Climate Institute)
The message is straightforward. Resilience is cheaper before the storm than after it.
The Infrastructure Paradox
Perhaps we need to change how we measure success. A bridge that never closes, a watermain that never breaks and an electrical system that rarely goes dark may appear uneventful. That lack of drama is precisely the achievement.
Good infrastructure is supposed to be boring.
The question for Canada is whether we are prepared to pay for boring.
Are taxpayers willing to accept higher costs today to avoid much larger costs tomorrow? Should municipalities replace assets according to engineering condition and lifecycle risk rather than waiting until failure becomes politically visible? Should governments receive more credit for disasters prevented than for emergency responses mounted afterward? And finally, if Canadians expect infrastructure to work virtually every minute of every day, are we prepared to fund it as though reliability actually matters?
The infrastructure we notice least may ultimately be the infrastructure that matters most.
About the Author:
Michael Martin is the Vice President of Technology with Metercor Inc., a Smart Meter, IoT, and Smart City systems integrator based in Canada. He has more than 40 years of experience in systems design for applications that use broadband networks, optical fibre, wireless, and digital communications technologies. He is a business and technology consultant. He was a senior executive consultant for 15 years with IBM, where he worked in the GBS Global Center of Competency for Energy and Utilities and the GTS Global Center of Excellence for Energy and Utilities. He is a founding partner and President of MICAN Communications and before that was President of Comlink Systems Limited and Ensat Broadcast Services, Inc., both divisions of Cygnal Technologies Corporation (CYN: TSX).
Martin served on the Board of Directors for TeraGo Inc (TGO: TSX) and on the Board of Directors for Avante Logixx Inc. (XX: TSX.V). He has served as a Member, SCC ISO-IEC JTC 1/SC-41 – Internet of Things and related technologies, ISO – International Organization for Standardization, and as a member of the NIST SP 500-325 Fog Computing Conceptual Model, National Institute of Standards and Technology. He served on the Board of Governors of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) [now Ontario Tech University] and on the Board of Advisers of five different Colleges in Ontario – Centennial College, Humber College, George Brown College, Durham College, Ryerson Polytechnic University [now Toronto Metropolitan University]. For 16 years he served on the Board of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Toronto Section.
He holds three master’s degrees – in business (MBA), communication (MA), and education (MEd). As well, he has three undergraduate diplomas and seven major certifications in business, computer programming, internetworking, project management, media, photography, and communication technology. He has completed over 80 next generation MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) [aka Micro Learning] continuous education programs in a wide variety of topics, including: Economics, Python Programming, Internet of Things, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive systems, Blockchain, Agile, Power BI, Big Data, Design Thinking, Security, Indigenous Canada awareness, and more.
Martin is a volunteer, a photographer, a learner, a technologist, a philosophizer, and a romantic optimist.