Chris Selley: 'Soft corruption' from too many government workers keeps us from having nice things

Even in utterly gridlocked Toronto, it’s absurd that a crew would spend two hours a day on the road

One of the enduring frustrations of Canadian urban life is that the nice things we all want — the things we gawk at on vacation on other continents — cost far more here than they do elsewhere. This manifests itself most noticeably with respect to major infrastructure. According to the Transit Costs Project, Toronto’s woebegone Eglinton Crosstown LRT project has (so far) cost US$232 million per kilometre. A comparable project in Rennes, France, completed two years ago, cost US$125 million per kilometre. The Barcelona Metro’s ongoing Line 9/10 project comes in at US$162 million per kilometre. Montreal’s Blue Line Metro extension is currently budgeted at a mind-melting US$703 million per kilometre.