A small ambulance station squatting on a corner lot in Toronto's west end is easy to overlook, its only notable feature a bright blue door and a matching blue stripe across its rooftop and garage.
But depending who you ask, the nondescript building represents either the best or the worst of the federal government's ambitious $13-billion infrastructure stimulus plan, announced last year as a cornerstone of Canada's two-year economic recovery plan.
The Emergency Medical Services building is slated to be torn down this spring and rebuilt using money from the Harper government's new $4-billion Infrastructure Stimulus Fund (ISF), one of the new programs announced in last January's budget to repair crumbling roads, sewers and buildings to help Canada climb out of recession.
To ensure quick economic stimulus, the government insisted last year that ISF projects had to be “shovel ready” to launch immediately, and they had to be completed by March, 2011.
More than a year later, however, much of the work hasn't started yet, including the $2.1-million project to rebuild Toronto's EMS Station 19.
Of the 6,700 projects awarded stimulus funding, more than half are under way, and almost all of the rest will launch this year. Critics say that means the bulk of the spending will come this year, for projects such as EMS Station 19, when the worst need has passed.
The exact impact on the economy has proven difficult for economists to measure, in large part because the government has not yet released details about how much money has been spent on various projects to date.
This makes it impossible to do even rudimentary estimates of the program's contribution to economic growth or job creation.
“It certainly will add substantially to [gross domestic product] growth in the two-year period of 2009 and 2010, but in terms of splitting it up by quarter or by year, you can only do that in very broad generalizations without the detailed numbers,” says Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC World Markets Inc.
