Projects and Collaborations

CPWA collaborates in national initiatives and projects with stakeholders who have similar interests in issues related to building better communities, infrastructure, and public works.

National Public Works Week

One of CPWA’s most visible public works outreach campaigns is National Public Works Week (NPWW), observed each year during the third full week of May. NPWW is a celebration of the tens of thousands of men and women in North America who provide and maintain the infrastructure and services collectively known as public works. NPWW seeks to inform both policymakers and the public about the essential services that public works provides and about the professionals who provide those services. Municipalities host open houses, education displays, school visits, career fairs, equipment demonstrations, and staff appreciation events. CPWA also holds an awards contest for Canadian municipalities who celebrate NPWW.

Learn more about the NPWW awards >

Canadian Infrastructure Report Card

CPWA was among the four organizations that created and made up the steering committee for the first Canadian Infrastructure Report Card (CIRC) in 2012, as well as a second edition released in 2016. The CIRC project was created to establish a rigorous, repeatable process for assessing the health of Canada’s infrastructure and to inform the Canadian public, policymakers and other stakeholders about issues and trends. The report card assessed and reported on the state of infrastructure—including inventory, condition and replacement value—in the categories of drinking water, wastewater, stormwater, municipal roads and bridges, municipal transit, sport and recreation infrastructure and asset management.

In 2017, building on the work of the CIRC, Statistics Canada (StatsCan) launched Canada’s Core Public Infrastructure Survey, which was developed with Infrastructure Canada to collect statistical information on the inventory, condition, performance and asset management strategies of nine categories of core public infrastructure assets owned or leased by various levels of Canadian government. StatsCan released the data and analysis from the first survey in late 2018. In 2019, CPWA and the other CIRC Partners agreed that the lack of financial context and analysis in the data released by StatsCan would make a new CIRC a valuable product. The CIRC Partners released a third edition of the CIRC in October 2019.

Canadian Infrastructure Report Card – Asset Management Primer

The 2012 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card demonstrated the need for a better practice of asset management in Canadian municipalities. The CIRC Steering Committee worked with the Canadian Network of Asset Managers (CNAM) to provide a asset management "primer" which makes recommendations and serves as a resource.

Asset Management Competency Framework for Canadian Communities

In 2019, CPWA partnered with the Canadian Network of Asset Managers (CNAM) and ten other national associations to develop an Asset Management Competency Framework for Canadian Communities. The framework helps municipalities formally capture the asset management skills, behaviors and knowledge needed across their organization, and enables them to measure, assess and put training plans in place to help staff fill the gaps. The project is part of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) Municipal Asset Management Program (MAMP), which is funded by the Government of Canada. The Asset Management Competency Framework for Canadian Communities was released in 2020 and can be downloaded here.