Why more Canadian municipalities are adopting dig-once ordinances

Ottawa gave dig-once new momentum this year. Budget 2025 introduced a federal dig-once policy requiring telecom operators to coordinate fibre installation during infrastructure projects of "national significance," alongside a consultation aimed at streamlining approval requirements for telecom infrastructure, including cell tower deployment. That's a federal-level signal, but the practical work of dig-once — coordinating a water main replacement with a fibre conduit install so the street only gets opened once — happens at the municipal level, on municipal capital budgets, through municipal permitting desks.

The logic is hard to argue with

A road gets repaved, and eighteen months later a different crew is back cutting a trench through the same block for fibre. The municipality absorbs the wear on a surface it just paid to renew, residents absorb a second round of construction disruption, and the carrier absorbs a full open-cut cost it could have shared. Dig-once policies require excavators working in the public right-of-way to notify the municipality and coordinate with other planned or in-progress digs, and in many versions, to install additional conduit for future use whenever a trench is already open. The near-term cost of that extra conduit is real — dig-once construction isn't free — but it's a fraction of the cost of a second full excavation later.

Where municipalities are actually starting

The municipalities getting the most out of dig-once aren't the ones that pass an ordinance and stop there. The ones that see results build three things first: a capital project coordination system so anyone digging — utilities, the municipality's own public works crews, private carriers — can see what else is planned for a given corridor over the next 12 to 24 months; a standard conduit specification so conduit installed today is usable by whoever needs it in three years, instead of the wrong size or the wrong material; and a way to fold the resulting asset into the municipality's existing asset management plan, since underground conduit installed under a dig-once program is a tangible capital asset that needs to be tracked, valued, and maintained under PSAB 3150 like anything else in the ground.

None of this requires new legislative authority in most provinces — it's closer to an operational and permitting change than a bylaw project, though a formal ordinance does give a municipality more leverage to require coordination from private excavators rather than just requesting it.

The advisory work is in the sequencing

Where municipalities most often need outside support isn't in deciding whether dig-once makes sense — most public works staff arrive at that conclusion on their own — but in sequencing it against a real capital plan: which corridors have digs scheduled in the next two years, what conduit spec makes sense for that corridor's likely future use, and how the cost of the extra conduit gets allocated between the municipality and whichever carrier eventually leases it. Get that sequencing wrong and dig-once becomes a policy on paper with no projects behind it. Get it right, and it starts paying for itself within a couple of capital cycles.