With a unique blend of candour and humour, Down the Road Never Travelled chronicles the arduous journey Brigitte Pellerin and her fellow researchers undertook in their attempts to track a tax dollar through one government spending program.

Imagine coming home one evening and announcing to your significant other that the only way to truly understand how government worked was to study it from the ground up - to literally look into the sewer lines, leaking water mains, pothole-ridden roads and collapsing bridges of Canadian cities. This was Pellerin's goal when she embarked on an investigation of the Canada Infrastructure Works Program (CIWP), a government initiative that promised to repair the country's crumbling infrastructure and create jobs for Canadians.

The task, Pellerin believed, would be relatively easy: to determine whether the government did what it said it would under this program. How hard could that be? As it turned out, it was nearly impossible.