‘Do I need to add pothole insurance?’: Canadian drivers face crumbling infrastructure due to extreme weather

Adrian Ghobrial reports how major winter storms and extreme cold this winter have wreaked havoc on city infrastructure across Canada.

TORONTO — For drivers dodging around crumbling Canadian infrastructure, navigating our roads can feel like a winter sport. If you lose, it comes with costly consequences.

A CAA report says members in Ontario and Manitoba are forking over an average of $900 out of pocket each time their vehicle is damaged by a pothole.

“There’s an additional cost that taxpayers bear when they suffer vehicle damage as a result of the impact of the climate on our infrastructure,” said Teresa Di Felice, CAA vice-president of government and community relations.

In January, the front driver’s side tire of Toronto driver Georgia Nevison’s vehicle became a casualty of a roadside crater.

“The pothole was about the size of my car,” said Nevison, adding that thankfully, her rim wasn’t damaged, but she still had to shell out more than $400 for a new tire and repairs.

“As a Torontonian, do I need to add pothole insurance into my monthly budget?” Nevison asked. “One city street, I had to make a detour to a different street, because the road I was on resembled one you’d find in (the) Third World.”

“When I see all these potholes, it doesn’t feel like my tax dollars are being spent to fix much of anything,” shared the Toronto driver.

From Jan. 1 to Feb. 25, the City of Toronto’s website noted that more than 23,000 potholes had been filled. Over the same months last year, Toronto had filled an additional 10,000 potholes; go back to the same two-month period in 2024, the city had patched up double the number of potholes.

“Year-to-date pothole repairs are lower than in previous years, mainly because the high number of winter events has required our crews and resources to focus on snow clearing and snow removal operations,” shared a City of Toronto spokesperson.

As of Monday, the City of Toronto says it received nearly 1,200 pothole claims, a 47 per cent increase from the same time last year. But this is far from being a Toronto-centric problem.

In Atlantic Canada, Nova Scotia music legend Anne Murray recently took to social media, writing: “I’m going to get some sand for my car so I can start filling the potholes in the streets of Halifax.”

On Dec. 30, a watermain break in Calgary left firefighters scrambling to rescue 13 people from seven vehicles stuck in the gushing water that turned a roadway into a body of water. A boil-water advisory had to be declared for parts of the surrounding area near the incident.

Both CAA and the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) say that cash-strapped municipalities don’t have the capacity to fix aging infrastructure and climate-proof future projects.

“In Canada, we have an infrastructure deficit in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and a lot of that falls on the back of our municipal governments,” Liam McGuinty, vice-president of federal affairs for the IBC.

“They’re very constrained in terms of what they can do to raise those funds. You need provincial governments, you need the federal government to really step up with funding for infrastructure that is more resilient to severe weather events. We’ve got to address that infrastructure deficit.”

The IBC says that 20 years ago, severe weather events cost about of $900 million annually in insured losses. But in the last decade, the annual average has skyrocketed to $3.7 billion, a 300 per cent increase.

“Insurance premiums have increased over the last several decades, and that is a factor (in) the major increase in severe weather events we’re having in Canada,” McGuinty said. “The reality is we’re all paying for the heightened frequency of weather events that Canada is facing.”

“We have brutal winters and it’s northing new,” said Nevison. “Potholes and other important infrastructure projects need to be made a priority.”

Nevison adds that last winter, her father had to replace four rims on his vehicle over the course of the season.

“These expenses add up. I hope next year, I’m not visiting the tire shop, yet again,” Nevison said.