The new amounts injected into infrastructure by all levels of government over the past few years has been welcome news, but have only managed to put a dent in a problem that has accumulated over a period of a few decades. This raises the question of how much work is still left to be done to clear away the backlog of deferred maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement of public assets - the so-called "infrastructure gap". Another way of looking at the public infrastructure gap is the accumulated annual deficit between the amount needed to properly maintain or replace existing public assets as well as to support growth with the amount actually spent.
Measuring the size of the gap is certainly no easy task, since the meanings placed on "public infrastructure" and "needs" will range across individuals. Still, that has not stopped Canadian researchers from taking a stab at it. For Canada as a whole, estimates of the gap range from a low of about $50 billion to a high of $125 billion. Moreover, sector-specific estimates show that infrastructure deficiencies are widespread across areas of public service and that the problem is more likely than not to rise further down the road.