There's $5 billion on the table. Port Moody should make sure we get our share.

Ottawa just put $5 billion on the table for BC infrastructure. The cities that planned ahead will get theirs. Will we?

Prime Minister Mark Carney in South Vancouver with Attorney General Niki Sharma, Premier David Eby, BC Housing Minister Christine Boyle, Federal Infrastructure Minister Gregor Roberston and Port Moody-Coquitlam MP Zoë Royer. Thursday, June 18, 2026.
Source: Prime Minister of Canada Facebook Page

Last week in Vancouver, the Prime Minister and Premier announced more than $5 billion over ten years for British Columbia's local infrastructure. The parts that matter most to a city like ours are the parts nobody put in a headline.

Nearly $1.6 billion, matched by the province for up to $3.2 billion, goes toward cutting development charges on multi-unit housing by as much as half in "priority communities," with savings of up to $40,000 a unit. The same pot pays for the unglamorous things that let housing happen: water mains, wastewater systems, local roads. There's another $2.5 billion for transit, and a program to turn more than 2,200 vacant condo units into affordable homes.

You'll hear some people call the development-charge piece a subsidy to developers. That misses the point. High charges don't just sit on a builder's books, they stall projects and add to the cost of every unit that does get built, which is a big part of why housing here is so expensive. And this isn't only about charges. The same package puts real money into water systems, sewers, roads, and community infrastructure that the public owns and uses.

The timing is the part worth sitting with. Rents across Metro Vancouver have been falling for two years and housing starts are slowing hard, presale launches in the Lower Mainland earlier this year ran at a fraction of a normal month. Some people read that as the pressure coming off. I read it the other way. The problem isn't that nobody wants homes, it's that the math of building them has stopped working, so projects stall before they start. Cutting the cost of building is one of the few levers that moves that math. This is the moment to pull it, not the moment to relax.

So no, $5 billion across the whole province over ten years won't fix everything. But it's a start, and a start you can build on beats a perfect plan that never arrives.

Here's the catch: this money doesn't arrive automatically. It flows to communities that apply, that have shovel-ready projects, and that can show senior governments they're serious about building. The portal is open for shovel-ready 2026 projects. And every growing city in the province is looking at the same announcement and thinking about its own list. That's the real contest, not whether the money exists, but which cities make the clearest case that they're ready to build.

Port Moody should be near the front of that line. We're a SkyTrain community taking real growth at Moody Centre AND Inlet Centre with the Inlet District under construction. We’re planning a replacement for Kyle Centre. There are upgrades that will be needed for our existing rec centre soon, including an indoor pool that Port Moody residents desperately want. The fire department has put forward a plan for a third fire hall, around Barnet and Clarke, to reach a growing part of the city that's hard to get to quickly. The library board has made the case that we're short on space, among the least library square footage per capita of comparable BC cities, with an expansion that could one day be part of redeveloping the old fire hall site. And underneath all of it sit the roads, water mains, and sewers that never get a ribbon-cutting but age, fail, and have to be upgraded as a city grows.

None of these are funded projects yet. That's exactly the gap a window like this is for. The work of winning it is specific: know your priorities cold and put numbers to them, get projects from "identified need" to shovel-ready before the queue fills with other cities' lists, and make the connection between our growth and these funds explicit in everything we send to Victoria and Ottawa, because that connection is the whole basis of the program. The communities that get treated as priorities are the ones that walk in already knowing their ask and can prove they'll deliver.

The money is there. Making sure some of it builds something here is work worth doing well, and worth starting now.