Canada's infrastructure was once cheap and effective to build. Now, it's a titanic transfer from taxpayers to the world's biggest businesses and investors

[We're delighted to have Rosemary Frei back with us, this time reporting on a global transformation: once, infrastructure was created efficiently cheap central bank funding and now it's done with public-private partnerships, at much higher price-tags, creating massive transfers from taxpayers to the biggest businesses and private equity funds in the world. As we get ready for huge infrastructure buildouts to address climate change, the super-rich stand to reap trillions money we could be spending on saving our lives and even our planet. -Cory]

Trillions of dollars are being plowed into high-tech hospitals, zero-emission public transit and other megaprojects around the globe. Shiny new infrastructure is popping up virtually everywhere, from Australia to Appalachia.

Yet leaders arent disclosing what taxpayers bills will be for this in the coming years.

They arent even determining the maximum affordable amount for the infrastructure projects, the majority of which are being delivered via public-private partnerships (P3s).

Nor are any of the major political parties in Canada or the U.S. calling for objective value-for-money analyses, including studies of what the best greenhouse-gas-reduction bang is for each scarce public buck spent on green projects.

In addition, government agencies dont always take such basic money-saving steps as offsetting the cost of new subway or LRT stations by finding developers that will build and pay for extensive retail, commercial and residential spaces on top of those stations.

This is despite already-unprecedented levels of government debt. And there are many other budget pressures: just one example is the impending loss, due to the switch to electric cars and trucks, of the more than $16 billion of gas and diesel tax collected annually by the feds and provinces in Canada. Read the rest