Fix what we have and stop building new roads, say Quebec engineers

It has been a bad year for potholes and the Quebec Order of Engineers says the province’s roads are only going to get worse if the problem of aging infrastructure isn’t addressed quickly.

The order’s president, Sophie Larivière-Mantha, says Quebec has historically built too many roads relative to its needs, and now it doesn’t have the money to maintain all of them properly.

“The problem is right now we need to maintain the roads that we have. We need to repair the roads that are broken, and we need to do emergency work as well, and we don’t have enough money to do all three” she says.

She adds, per capita, Quebec has 2.5 times more kilometers of paved roads than Ontario, and now all those roads are in worse shape than they should be.

How we design and pave our roads in Quebec, even how we fill potholes, is on par with neighbouring provinces, according to Ecole de technologie superiere (ETS) professor and Dean of Research, Alan Carter. He says the problem comes down to how we maintain our infrastructure.

“Maintenance of the road is actually somewhat cheap, and the more we wait, the more expensive it gets,” he says. “It’s exponential, the cost increases, and we are in the exponential part.”

In its 2025 annual report, the Quebec Auditor General noted the province’s projected infrastructure costs consistently fall short of what it actually invests each year.

Larivière-Mantha says the Quebec Infrastructure Plan doesn’t factor in things like municipal roads or the effects of climate change.

“We need to have that data, and that data needs to be given to the population for them to understand the problem and the crisis that we’re in with our infrastructure,” she says.

The Order of Engineers is calling on the province to stop building new roads and highways, and focus its spending on maintenance instead. Carter says one solution could be to use gravel in some parts of the province where roads are less travelled. He even suggests replacing some existing roads with gravel, instead of repairing them.

“2026 gravel roads have nothing to do with 1950s gravel roads,” he says. “We can make them much stronger, we can make them almost dust free, with a fraction of the cost of paved roads.”

Larivière-Mantha believes it is time for a province-wide conversation about the province’s infrastructure, and hopes the issue will be a top issue during the upcoming election campaign.

“We cannot go forward and give this infrastructure that has so many maintenance deficits to the next generation,” she said.