Thirty-five years ago, I was a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick. I vividly remember the moment when I crossed the border from Quebec into NB near Edmunston, because I drove off an adequate if not particularly generous two-lane blacktop highway onto what felt like the impact area of a mortar range. My poor little Volkswagen Rabbit hit that cratered surface at 100 kilometres per hour and damned near died. I don't know why that stretch of the Trans-Canada was so awful -- perhaps somebody had moved an entire regiment of Centurion tanks over it -- but it wasn't repaved for months.

When I lived in Nova Scotia, back in the 1970s, the condition of the province's roads was an evergreen issue in provincial politics. The best way to get elected was to promise road improvements, and the best way to get re-elected was to deliver road improvements.

I'll bet nothing much has changed.