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It seems harder than ever to construct basic infrastructure in this country – like roads and bridges – that humans have previously been doing with reasonable success for thousands of years.

“The bridge was over budget, years behind schedule, the basis for a multi-million dollar lawsuit and one of the walking paths leading up to it was the scene of the city’s latest homicide,” notes an Ottawa Citizen story from 2014 on the relatively small and simple Airport Parkway Pedestrian bridge in our nation’s capital. A year later, China built the famous Sanyuan Bridge in a mere 48 hours.

One part of the problem is no one knows how to let anything drop, no one will concede defeat – and our courts enable this childish mentality.

Kinder Morgan signed mutual benefit agreements with over 30 First Nations directly connected to the Trans Mountain pipeline’s pathway. Sitting down to cobble together contracts like that goes way beyond the legal obligation of “consultations”. But because a few other First Nations groups are ideologically opposed to resource development, the whole thing doesn’t go ahead and the rest of the First Nations lose out.

Take the court injunction planned by the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario against the Doug Ford government for revising sex-ed curriculum: The union and some teachers don’t like this move, but instead of contenting themselves with banging pots and pans in protest they dubiously claim they’ve got a Charter rights issue on their hands. And thus the government may have their hands tied from doing something clearly within their mandate. Whatever you think of the sex-ed issue, it just doesn’t belong in the courts.

All of the above are not one-offs. They’re part of larger trends. And these trends are worsening, not improving. They come with consequences too, some more visible than others. When your family member’s murderer walks, you see that. It hurts. When a pipeline doesn’t get built, you may not feel the lost jobs and revenue right away, but the lost opportunity costs are immense.

What does it all mean, taken together? Nothing less than the bit-by-bit erosion of our quality of life. Good luck keeping on this course, it won’t end well.

afurey@postmedia.com

Twitter: @anthonyfurey