Research

The Canada West Foundation brought together agri-food stakeholders and industry leaders to discuss ways to reduce sector-wide challenges and opportunities to create growth. This report from CWF, supported by the CIB, summarizes these discussions and highlights the fact that infrastructure investment, including small-scale investments like on-farm storage, irrigation and drainage, are solutions to help producers grow their operations.

Investing in housing-enabling infrastructure with low-cost financing can unlock new housing supply and restore affordability. Our report summarizes the barriers developers and municipalities face that limit new housing and explores various financing tools that could help advance projects of all types. The CIB’s Infrastructure for Housing Initiative is a lending solution that can alleviate development risks, improve project viability and accelerate the delivery of new housing. 

Global demand for critical minerals, the building blocks of the digital economy, represents an important economic opportunity for Canada. Our report summarizes insights we’ve heard from the market and makes recommendations on policy and financing tools to help unlock new mining projects. The CIB supports critical minerals projects across the entire supply chain. We can partner with owners, developers and investors to deliver innovative financing solutions that accelerate and make projects commercially viable.

Signal 49’s report examines how Canada can build a future-ready trade infrastructure network. Based on consultations with industry stakeholders and the CIB, it identifies several bottlenecks limiting the pace of approval and construction for trade and transportation projects. The report highlights projects that aim to improve the efficiency of trade networks, support exports from emerging industries, advance economic development in Canada’s North and improve resilience to climate change.

The Public Policy Forum’s report advocates for policies and approaches to increase investment in major Canadian energy and critical minerals infrastructure projects. This research, which engaged CIB staff, offers a perspective on how governments can improve the pace of project reviews, approvals and construction. 

The C.D. Howe Institute published a report outlining how infrastructure banks around the world are a cost-efficient policy tool to address market failures and catalyze private investment in infrastructure. The research, supported by the CIB, explores case studies of six infrastructure banks in Australia, California, Canada, the Nordic-Baltic region, Scotland and the UK, highlighting how each is financially self-sufficient, responds to local priorities and helps more projects attract private investors. 

KPMG’s study explores how investments in infrastructure projects support private investment throughout the economy. The study details ten of the CIB’s projects, showing how increased export capacity, power, reliable internet access and technology supported job creation and exports across the country.

The Canadian Urban Institute’s report proposed financing and funding models for municipalities to drive investment into housing-enabling infrastructure. The report, supported by the CIB, was part of the initial research conducted when developing our Infrastructure for Housing Initiative.

The Atlantic Economic Council’s report identifies opportunities for investment into hydrogen and clean fuel production, critical minerals, and trade and transportation infrastructure in Atlantic Canada. This research was supported by the CIB to learn from regional stakeholders about which priorities they believe would offer material benefits.

The Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) released a report outlining strategies for infrastructure investment in non-traditional transportation systems such as aerial transit, micromobility (bikes or e-bikes), ferries, on-demand transit and autonomous shuttles. This report, supported by the CIB to understand lessons learned from other countries, considers both international and domestic case studies and industry trends, and identifies the role each solution plays in international transit networks.

The University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute released a report argues that transit projects can increase property values and economic activity for nearby landowners and businesses. The report, supported by the CIB, identifies several municipal funding tools to help monetize these benefits and estimates whether revenues could be used to fund future transit expansions.

Research by the Delphi Group and the Canada Green Building Council identified the barriers and bottlenecks to increasing energy efficiency retrofits for large buildings, including industrial, commercial and large residential buildings. It focused on the labour and skills related bottlenecks, considering workforce capacity throughout the supply chain. This work was supported by the CIB to better understand whether labour and skills challenges would represent a risk to the success of the CIB’s retrofit financing.

Toronto Metropolitan University’s report examined how increasing connectivity across critical infrastructure such as energy, water and transportation has improved efficiency while introducing new cyber risks. The CIB supported this work to better understand the risks, challenges and capacity gaps faced by Canadian municipalities as they consider future infrastructure spending.

The Atlantic provinces and the federal government developed a roadmap for how jurisdictions can work together to achieve a clean power future for the region. Federal and provincial governments explored options for an enhanced, reliable power grid and the CIB supported discussions to identify whether clean power priorities could emerge from discussions.

The Canadian Energy Research Institute’s research quantified potential climate impacts on electricity systems in Canada under a variety of different emission scenarios. The research, supported by the CIB, considered impacts by province and for select municipalities with impacts varying by hazard type and local climate.

Research by Signal 49 identified the potential benefits associated with micro-grid deployment, focusing on environmental and job creation benefits for Indigenous communities. This research was supported by the CIB as its clean power program was under development.