Financing infrastructure : who should pay?

Most current discussion of the infrastructure gap in Canada today often amounts to little more than a plea for someone else to pay the bills. However, although there are some reasons for higher-level governments to provide some local infrastructure projects, in the end, the bill must be paid either by user charges or by taxing someone and, whenever feasible, user charges are better. What we should do – make users pay whenever possible – is clear. In fact, however, we seldom do so. In this paper, drawing heavily on our recent book we discuss briefly why users should pay, why they seldom do, and how we may perhaps do better in the future