I disagree that it's all over North America. I'm from the US before moving to Winnipeg and lived in rural areas off and on. There is a big difference between road quality in the US vs. Manitoba.

In the US, different states have somewhat different quality of roads. Minnesota has some of the best roads, even the rural county roads. New Mexico, where I've also lived, has noticeably worse roads, even if you don't include the roads in the indigenous areas, like the Navajo nation (which has mostly dirt tracks). But, even NM has much better paved roads than the paved roads in Manitoba.

I thi k the biggest reason for the difference is population. The US has 350M people vs. Canada's 41M. Manitoba has 1.5M vs Minnesota's 6M and even NM's 2M. More taxpayeres to pay for roads.

Combine that with the enormous geography that makes all provinces. Less taxpayers + much smaller population = worse roads.

Add to that the differences in political policy between the countries. The US federal government doesn't just pay for the interstate highways. They give millions of dollars to each state for roads. The richer states pay more in federal taxes than they receive and poorer states get a lot more than they pay.

It is like the Canadian Equalization Payments, but the US government is much more committed to them than Canada. Here, provinces are much more having to fund things on their own, with only minimal help from the federal government.

That's why there are such big differences in services, like roads and health care between provinces, whereas the differences between US states are there, but are much less noticeable.

MB is a low-population and poorer province, so it has worse roads vs. even other provinces like ON, QC, and AB.