Clearing the infrastructure gap in First Nations communities will cost C$349 billion by 2030, and the total tab will exceed $500 billion by 2040 if the federal government doesn’t take action, the Assembly of First Nations warned last week.
“Without immediate and decisive action, First Nations are at risk of facing more than 60 more years of inadequate access to infrastructure, housing, and digital connectivity,” AFN National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak said in a statement.
“Promises have been made and must now be kept,” Woodhouse Nepinak added, just a week before Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland delivered a budget that included an average $82 million per year over five years for “economic reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples.
The AFN’s Closing the Infrastructure Gap by 2030 report covers housing, schools, water plants, roads, and other assets like ports, wharves, clinics, and digital connectivity, CBC reports. A longstanding gap in Indigenous housing accounts for about $135 billion of the total.
The report “ties the enormous deficit to decades of underfunding, federal failures, and unfair distribution of wealth,” CBC says. “Woodhouse Nepinak said the government now has all the data it needs and can no longer make excuses for underfunding and neglect, since the report bears Indigenous Services Canada’s seal of approval.”
The report says closing the infrastructure gap in First Nations communities would create more than 3.2 million jobs and add more than $1 trillion to Canada’s GDP.
The AFN published its report on the same day that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued a call for US$6.9 trillion in sustainable infrastructure by 2030—the total needed to meet global sustainable development goals while building resilience to heatwaves, floods, longer wildfire seasons, and widespread droughts made worse by climate change.
The OECD said economic losses from disasters grew seven-fold between the 1970s and the 2010s, from an average $198 billion to $1.6 trillion—not including the impacts on businesses and communities that were disrupted along the way.
“The right type of infrastructure investment can help enhance the quality of growth, by supporting climate action while protecting biodiversity, reducing pollution, and enhancing resilience to risks from climate change,” said OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann.
“But the investments needed are significant. Unlocking private investments in climate resilience will require long-term project planning, reducing regulatory barriers, effective risk-sharing arrangements and, when required, the targeted and strategic use of public support to attract private financing.”
