Acajacques Yeah, one of the biggest brain cramps of the country's foundational moment was giving highway transportation to the provinces. Of all the things...
I guess maybe it made sense at the time.
If you look at even the most decentralized countries in the world, highway transportation is almost always a responsibility of the central government. Or at least, the central government has a huge role in it, as in the US.
In decentralized countries, jurisdictions even have incentives to limit how easy it is to "go away"... if you leave it up to New Brunswick taxpayers for example, they'd probably rather have a dirt road to Halifax, past Moncton. (Landlocked jurisdictions, okay, they have an interest in being able to receive and export goods, so that's different. And even then, from an Alberta point of view, you want a good freeway connection to the Port of Vancouver, but connections to points East of you, you don't care.)
For other examples, Quebec has little interest in paying for A-85 or the road to the Labrador coast after Blanc-Sablon. It's not like these roads would serve us. If anyone should wish for these connections, it's the Feds, not Quebec.
