Canadian Water Network’s (CWN) CEO Nicola Crawhall sat down for an in-depth interview with Peter Weltman. He is vice chair of the Canadian Infrastructure Council and director of business development at Technomics Consulting. Peter recently served as the Financial Accountability Officer of Ontario and as a member of the Peel Region Transition Board.

What interests you about national infrastructure data?

Throughout my career, I have spent a lot of time pushing for transparency in government decision-making. Public infrastructure is essential for the country to grow. Governments need to find a way to plan, finance, and deliver public infrastructure better.

This started as early as 2009, when I worked at the federal Parliamentary Budget Office. I explained to federal elected officials about how the infrastructure stimulus funds would work. Then as Ontario’s Financial Accountability Officer, I explained the cost implications of climate change impacts on public infrastructure. People need to understand that infrastructure wear and tear will get much worse as roads, buildings, and pipes that were designed for the climate of 50 years ago cannot withstand the climate of today or 50 years from now. We estimated the cost of adapting Ontario’s infrastructure.

At Technomics, we produce data analytics and insights on defence and infrastructure contracts. When decision-makers are purchasing complex infrastructure, say a warship, we use the data to provide insights about potential project delays and cost overruns. For instance, a warship has many components that have to be ‘plugged’ in. That requires a skilled labour force. Those ‘plug-in’ points may cause delays. With the right data analytics and insights from similar projects, the government can anticipate the delays and mitigate them by preparing the labour force with the appropriate skills to be ready for these complex projects. The same applies for LRT projects, ports, highways, and water and wastewater projects. We are all competing for the same skilled labour force. We need to tweak training now to make sure we have the right skilled labour force to deliver these projects in the future. The first step is to devote time and resources to analytical data.

Why did Canada need a National Infrastructure Assessment?

The National Infrastructure Assessment (NIA), in its purest form, provides a long-term, big scope view of what infrastructure Canada has now — water and wastewater services, solid waste, public transit and active transportation, in the case of the first NIA. It is also trying to answer key questions. In what state of repair is this infrastructure currently? How much will it cost to maintain this infrastructure in a state of good repair? Looking out 20 years, where will people be living? What will the economy look like? What infrastructure will be needed to support economic activity and communities across Canada? It’s a tall order. Ultimately, this information will help governments prioritize where to invest money.

I am one of 11 experts appointed by the Minister of Housing and Infrastructure to the Canadian Infrastructure Council last year for a three-year term to oversee the development of the NIA. We are an independent advisory body that reports directly to the Minister. Our job is to review the data and analytics the federal government already has, and reach out to groups for more information and commentary. We received over 300 submissions when the concept of an NIA for Canada was first introduced in 2021 and reached out to over 150 groups earlier this year to hear about their key issues and challenges.

Over the past year, we have released a series of sector-specific papers, including one on the water and wastewater sector. More information is available here. The first comprehensive report, focused on housing enabling infrastructure, was released on November 27, 2025.

What were some of your key takeaways in developing the first NIA?

The first is that there is a fiscal imbalance when it comes to maintaining and delivering public infrastructure in Canada. The owners of most of this infrastructure, municipalities, do not have the fiscal capacity to maintain existing, and pay for new, infrastructure. Their two revenue sources, property taxes and user fees, are largely inelastic, meaning they don’t change much depending on the state of the economy. If it is a time of growth, they don’t have any more money available to respond. So, they are highly reliant on senior government grants. We can see how this has manifested on the ground. Suburban areas, where most of Canada’s growth occurs, lacked the revenues to respond to growth. They became reliant on development charges for growth. These charges to developers were passed on to new homeowners, increasing the cost of housing. For the first time, new homeowners were paying the whole cost of infrastructure serving their homes, a cost that previous generations did not have to pay.

A second  is that the three levels of government do not coordinate their infrastructure financing effectively. When municipalities apply for senior government grants, there may be criteria like projects being ‘shovel-ready’ or a bias towards surface-level projects over underground infrastructure to be more visible to the public for ‘ribbon-cutting.’ Often, there is little or no funding available for the most invisible yet essential financing: investment in maintaining existing infrastructure. We need better coordination across the three levels of government regarding the financing and delivery of infrastructure.

Thirdly, the NIA found that the data to document what infrastructure Canada has — urban, semi-urban, rural, northern and remote — and the value of this infrastructure is sporadic. Unfortunately, crummy data doesn’t absolve decision-makers from taking the decisions they have to take regarding planning and delivering infrastructure. We need better data, which will narrow the range in a probabilistic estimate and make an ‘as close to right’ decision as is possible.

Statistics Canada started gathering national demographic and infrastructure data about 10 years ago at the metropolitan census area level. They are now gathering more granular data that can help municipalities better understand trends in people’s movement within census metropolitan areas. That will allow municipalities to respond before problems arise.

It comes down to a decision-maker’s confidence in data and risk tolerance. If you, as a decision-maker, are confident in the project you are about to fund, and the organization has a lot of experience in building these types of projects, you might be ok to set the budget at the 50^th confidence interval. This means there is a 50 percent chance the actual cost will exceed the funds made available, but that is a risk you are willing to take. If your risk tolerance is lower, or the project is riskier than what you have undertaken before, you might want to budget at the 80^th confidence interval, which means there is only a 20 percent chance that the actual cost will be higher than budgeted. Clearly, the budget at the 50^th is much lower than at the 80^th confidence interval.

A major recommendation of the NIA is that the best investment we can make is to manage the demand on existing infrastructure, maintain it in a state of good repair, avoid disruption to service from infrastructure failure, and adapt and prepare for worsening climate impacts.

It is my own contention that federal and provincial governments should therefore incentivize municipalities to invest in existing infrastructure, for example, by requiring that a share of any funding received be dedicated to asset management.

There remains the challenge of convincing local decision-makers that investments in existing infrastructure are essential. How do you package and communicate operations and maintenance (O&M) to make it more attractive? This NIA is a first step in sensitizing decision-makers to the scale of the investment needed.

Then there is the public that largely takes infrastructure for granted. When they see the bill to repair or replace infrastructure, they don’t like it. We need to communicate that infrastructure isn’t a hidden thing, but an essential service on which our health and our economic prosperity depend.