U.S. President Biden recently signed into law his $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill. The bill channels federal money to private construction firms to repair and build public infrastructure. Many of the projects concern transportation such as roads, bridges and railways.

The new or refurbished transportation infrastructure will then become material value transferred into the goods and services the economy and its workers and enterprises produce. Much of the value from infrastructure is not realized (paid for) by the users because the enterprises consuming the value do not pay in full for what they use and consume.

Two significant aspects of government-provided infrastructure are the direct benefits to private construction companies received from lucrative and guaranteed contracts, and the value from infrastructure not fully realized by the enterprises consuming it. These two factors are major pay-the-rich schemes that contribute to the continued imperialist control of the economy and greater concentration of wealth, power and privilege in the hands of a few.

Implications for Canada in the bill reside with the targeted spending to build cross-border north-south railway infrastructure that more firmly ties the Canadian economy to the U.S. imperialists. The bill allocates tens of billions of dollars for expanded passenger (and freight) rail traffic from New York to Toronto, from New York via the old “Vermonter” to Montreal, from Chicago through Detroit to Toronto and from Portland/Seattle to Vancouver.

Parallel with the infrastructure spending on railways up to and into Canada is the demand from U.S. authorities led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to establish pre-clearance border facilities at railway stations. Schumer and others are pressuring Canadian officials to place passport controls at Canadian railway stations similar to those that now exist in some airports.

Written into the bill is the requirement that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg along with the U.S. public railway company Amtrak and various state officials meet with the Canadian government sometime in 2022 and prepare a progress report for Congress on what Canadians are prepared to pay and allow regarding Amtrak operations in Canada. Specifically, the bill demands Buttigieg and other officials “identify challenges to Amtrak operations in Canada,” including “delays associated with custom and immigration inspections in both Canada and the United States.”

The north/south travel corridors for goods and people are mainly to access Canadian raw material to feed the U.S. war economy. Aside from directly drawing Canada objectively into the U.S. economic sphere, these travel corridors strive to implant an outlook and sense of only one economy in North America under the domination of the U.S. oligarchs and their flunkeys, and that independent self-reliant economies in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. under the control of the people are not feasible or even possible.

Infrastructure Spending to Pay the Rich — One Example

Extensive public infrastructure is necessary in any modern economy. The ruling oligarchs greatly benefit from this infrastructure in its building and operation. The benefits to the rich from its use are not always obvious. How the value from infrastructure should be realized is mainly assumed to be from taxation. This means that the main value from infrastructure fills the pockets of the rich oligarchs.

U.S. authorities have proposed an expansion of the existing passenger railway down the west coast from Vancouver to Seattle and Portland. Amtrak wants to double the number of daily round-trips between Seattle and Vancouver on its Cascades line. The route is an “emerging corridor” that already has captured “significant passenger market share,” Amtrak says, creating conditions for “a dedicated high-speed rail corridor between Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.”

Direct beneficiaries from this infrastructure would be the private sports conglomerates that control professional football (Seattle Seahawks), hockey (Vancouver Canucks and Seattle Kraken) and soccer (MLS teams in Vancouver, Seattle and Portland). Aside from greater numbers of customers travelling to attend games, the conglomerates gain from the increased viewership on their TV networks (ESPN and Sportsnet).

Canadians have no say or control over these infrastructure decisions. No social or political forms exist in which people can exercise their right to decide on these matters that affect their lives and communities. The ruling oligarchs decide everything so that it favours their existing empires and blocks working people from exercising any power to decide matters in ways that favour them and open a path forward. To control the decisions that affect their lives, the pressing need for the people is to organize to renew the democracy and democratic institutions. The people should not and cannot lose sight of that necessity.

(TML Daily, posted January 25, 2022)