As the infrastructure deficit exceeds capital and operational budgets, the leaders in charge of Canada’s municipal water and wastewater assets and operations are being asked to do more with less. User rates are not high enough to reflect the true cost of water infrastructure and operations and government funding alone—at all levels—can’t meet demand. How can these leaders cope with expanding capacity to accommodate growth while replacing and repairing failing…

Four of the five Great Lakes help to define the U.S.-Canada border; but what separates our two countries brings them together as well. The Great Lakes lie at the heart of the U.S.—Canada trade relationship, the largest in history, with bilateral trade totalling nearly $670 billion a year. Having grown up in Buffalo, N.Y., and attended high school in Niagara Falls, Ont., I have a personal appreciation of how cross-border…

Roman aqueducts and sewers provide a powerful emblem of the antiquity of urban water infrastructure—centralized approaches to water and wastewater service provision may seem similarly old, but are in fact largely a product of the twentieth century. The centralized model arose as a response to a difficult conundrum: how to provide essential services to an urban form that was rapidly and radically transforming through a massive population boom and the…