Business
The Runaway Costs of Government Construction Projects
From the C2C Journal
By Gwyn Morgan
Ottawa’s post-pandemic $300 billion spending orgy was coupled with the pompous claim to “Build Back Better”. As it happened, most of that spending was recklessly borrowed – stoking inflation – while Build Back Better was a dud, was discarded in embarrassment and, if recalled at all today, is told as a sick joke. Far too many planned projects now sink into a quicksand of political haggling, regulatory overkill, mission creep, design complexity and, if built at all, bungled execution. Looking at specific examples, Gwyn Morgan presents the lamentable results: far less is actually getting built across Canada, nearly everything takes forever and – worst of all – costs routinely soar to ludicrous levels. Added to that, Morgan notes, are woke-based criteria being imposed by the Trudeau government that are worsening the vicious cycle.
Not so long ago, a $10 million government infrastructure project was regarded as a significant expenditure. Nowadays, $10 million doesn’t come close to funding projects as simple as a firehall or new police station. Here in the Victoria region, a new firehall in the District of Saanich, originally budgeted at $25.6 million, has jumped to nearly $45 million over four years – and construction has barely begun. The facility will support 10 firefighters. In the Langford District, the estimated cost of a new RCMP building is an incomprehensible $82 million – and of course, nothing has actually been done yet, so this price tag will surely soar. Just north of Victoria, the cost of what was to be a simple flyover eliminating a dangerous left turn across the busy Patricia Bay Highway has spiked from its original estimate of $44 million to $77 million.
These cost increases seem big to us here on “Fantasy Island”, but they would amount to a rounding error in mega-city Toronto. The Ontario Line, a 15.6-kilometre light-rail transit line connecting the Science Centre to Ontario Place, was budgeted at $10.9 billion when first announced in 2019. A series of updates have seen the cost balloon to an estimated $19 billion – an increase of more than 70 percent – with the completion date pushed out by four years to 2031. Expect more cost increases to be announced.
These are just a few examples of municipal and provincial cost increases and overruns. The story is similar from coast to coast, with no project type or size in any municipality or province immune to an unsettling syndrome that seems to prevent nearly anything from being planned cost-effectively and then delivered on budget. Obviously, the total for all such projects planned or underway across Canada is immensely higher – surely in the tens of billions of dollars.
Mismanagement syndrome: From simple firehalls to subway sections to straightforward software, governments at all levels have lost control of costs. Replacing a small firehall in Saanich on Vancouver Island (top left and top right) will cost nearly $2,000 per square foot or $4.5 million per firefighter; the pricetag for Toronto’s planned Ontario Line (bottom left) has zoomed from $10.9 billion to $19 billion; and the notorious ArriveCAN (bottom right) consumed $54 million to deliver an $80,000 software tool. (Sources of images: (top left) District of Saanich; (top right) rendering courtesy of hcma, retrieved from naturally:wood; (bottom left) Metrolinx; (bottom right) WestJet/Facebook)
Now for the project mismanagement champion of all. Statistics Canada data show that federal capital infrastructure project expenditures totalled $24.1 billion in the period 2018-2021 (the most recent year for which figures are available). Given that Ottawa bureaucrats are famous for mismanaging virtually every project (think of the notorious ArriveCAN app, whose development blew through $54 million to yield a buggy software tool that private-sector geeks could have cranked out for $80,000), there can be no doubt that a lot of those billions were to pay for overruns resulting from a combination of sloppy design specifications and poor execution.
But now the Trudeau government has added costly “social justice” specifications to federal procurement requirements, including participation by ethnic minorities, disabled persons and diverse genders, plus other elements of woke ideology. These elements were clearly demonstrated in what I’ll call “The Great Helicopter Hangar Saga”. The following is a recollection from sources I know to be completely reliable.
The Canadian Forces’ 443 (Pacific) Maritime Helicopter Squadron’s hangar had been located adjacent to the Victoria Airport for many years. In November 2004, the Department of National Defence (DND) announced the award of a $1.8 billion contract for 28 Sikorsky CH-148 Cyclone helicopters, of which a number were to be based on Vancouver Island. A new hangar was required, which seems reasonable. DND engineers designed a facility that would meet the squadron’s needs at an estimated cost of roughly $18 million. Then they handed the project to Public Works and Government Services Canada. That’s when the project entered an ephemeral space resembling the old sci-fi TV series The Twilight Zone.
Public Works decided the hangar needed to be able to “sustain operations” in the event of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake – an incomprehensible decision for several reasons. First, 8.0 on the Richter Scale is seven times larger than the most severe earthquake ever recorded on Vancouver Island. Second, the severity of earthquake damage at any given location depends on its subsurface. Buildings sitting on soil and gravel suffer much more damage than those built on bedrock because the soft material changes from behaving like a solid to behaving like a thick liquid, amplifying the ground’s shaking. The Pacific Maritime Helicopter Squadron’s hangar was located on solid bedrock. That alone made it highly earthquake-resilient.
But the Public Works technocrats were oblivious to those facts, or didn’t care. Instead, their design demanded steel piles driven into the bedrock at a cost of $8 million. That alone reportedly delayed the project by two years. Cross-bracing of the interior wall openings added more millions. When construction of the actual building finally began, government bureaucrats specified more office space, locker and “administrative security” facilities than what the DND had considered necessary, adding more costs.
Then came the woke-related costs. In determining the contract award, Public Works required First Nations involvement both as subcontractors and in the workforce, extensive gender diversity and complete disabled access. Elevators were ordered equipped with Braille at the control buttons plus voice recognition – along with full wheelchair accessibility. Members of the military joked that all these extras must be for the “blind and disabled pilots”. By the time the new hangar was handed back to the military, the DND’s $18 million project had skyrocketed to a staggering $155 million.
Braille for blind pilots: To base some of the Royal Canadian Air Force’s new CH-148 Cyclone maritime helicopters (above, performing in-flight refuelling with a navy frigate in the North Atlantic) on Vancouver Island, federal Public Works bureaucrats took a reasonable $18 million Department of Defence design and transformed it into a $155 million fiasco reflecting Ottawa’s diversity obsessions and wokist ideology. (Sources of photos: (top) Lockheed Martin, retrieved from Navy Recognition; (bottom) The Lookout)
In July 2019, Phillip Cross wrote an inciteful column for the Financial Post entitled, “Why governments keep screwing up major infrastructure projects”. As Cross put it, “Prominent studies of domestic and international public infrastructure projects found cost overruns averaged between 45 and 86 percent.” Why? In Cross’s view, a big part of the problem is that “public projects suffer from a lack of accountability. Governments evaluate projects not according to the performance-based criteria of the private sector, but by their conformity to rules and processes.”
Cross’s points are well-taken and illustrated by circling back to our Saanich Firehall example. The new facility’s 23,476 square feet will incur a construction cost of over $1,900 per square foot (assuming the new $45 million budget is big enough). That is six to nine times typical construction costs for commercial buildings which, as this report shows, average $200-$300 per square foot. And while a firehall may well be a bit more sophisticated and hence costly to build than, say, a retail strip mall, the Saanich firehall’s costs are also wildly out of proportion to any class of construction, as the fascinating accompanying chart shows. As you can see, it lists a range of $415-$485 per square foot for emergency services buildings. Even technology-heavy, highly customized construction categories like hospitals and data centres come in at no more than $805 and $1,055 per square foot, respectively. Clearly, something is seriously wrong in Saanich and many other locations across Canada.
Outrageous by any standard: The ballooning construction costs of recent public-sector projects are many times higher than 2022 averages for all categories – even in a high-cost market like Vancouver. (Source of graph: Statista)
This evidence of dysfunctional project mismanagement comes at a time when public infrastructure spending is at record levels, dominated by the Justin Trudeau government’s $33 billion 2023-24 infrastructure project budget and sure to be made even more dysfunctional and costly by the Liberals’ surreptitious implementation of woke ideology. When will Canadians awaken and rise up against a government that defies the values of honesty and openness our country was built on?
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
Source of main image showing Vancouver’s Broadway Subway project: BC Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure; retrieved from ReNew Canada.
From Heartland Daily News
By Nick Pope
“California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort—coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid—will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country”
Large coalitions of red states are suing regulators in Washington, D.C., and California over rules designed to effectively require increases in electric vehicle (EV) adoption.
Nebraska is leading a 24-state coalition in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and a 17-state coalition suing the state of California in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California over its Advanced Clean Fleet rules. Both regulations would increase the number of heavy-duty EVs on the road, a development that could cause serious disruptions and cost increases across the U.S. economy, as supply chain and trucking sector experts have previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“California and an unaccountable EPA are trying to transform our national trucking industry and supply chain infrastructure. This effort—coming at a time of heightened inflation and with an already-strained electrical grid—will devastate the trucking and logistics industry, raise prices for customers, and impact untold number of jobs across Nebraska and the country,” Republican Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers said in a statement. “Neither California nor the EPA has the constitutional power to dictate these nationwide rules to Americans. I am proud to lead our efforts to stop these unconstitutional attempts to remake our economy and am grateful to our sister states for joining our coalitions.”
(RELATED: New Analysis Shows Just How Bad Electric Trucks Are For Business)
While specifics vary depending on the type of heavy-duty vehicle, EPA’s emissions standards will effectively mandate that EVs make up 60% of new urban delivery trucks and 25% of long-haul tractors sold by 2032, according to The Wall Street Journal. The agency has also pushed aggressive emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that will similarly force an increase in EVs’ share of new car sales over the next decade.
California’s Advanced Clean Fleet rules, meanwhile, will require that 100% of trucks sold in the state will be zero-emissions models starting in 2036, according to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). While not federal, the California rules are of importance to other states because there are numerous other states who follow California’s emissions standards, which can be tighter than those required by the EPA and other federal agencies.
Critics fear that this dynamic will effectively enable California to set national policies and nudge manufacturers in the direction of EVs at a greater rate and scale than the Biden administration is pursuing.
Trucking industry and supply chain experts have previously told the DCNF that both regulations threaten to cause serious problems for the country’s supply chains and wider economy given that the technology for electric and zero-emissions trucks is simply not yet ready to be mandated at scale, among other issues.
Neither CARB nor the EPA responded immediately to requests for comment.
Nick Pope is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Service.
Originally published by The Daily Caller. Republished with permission.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By WILL KESSLER
Converting America’s medium- and heavy-duty trucks to electric vehicles (EV) in accordance with goals from the Biden administration would add massive costs to commercial trucking, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.
The cost to switch over to light-duty EVs like a transit van would equate to a 5% increase in costs per year while switching over medium- and heavy-duty trucks would add up to 114% in costs per year to already struggling businesses, according to a report from transportation and logistics company Ryder Systems. The Biden administration, in an effort to facilitate a transition to EVs, finalized new emission standards in March that would require a huge number of heavy-duty vehicles to be electric or zero-emission by 2032 and has created a plan to roll out charging infrastructure across the country.
“There are specific applications where EV adoption makes sense today, but the use cases are still limited,” Karen Jones, executive vice president at Ryder, said in an accompanying press release. “Yet we’re facing regulations aimed at accelerating broader EV adoption when the technology and infrastructure are still developing. Until the gap in TCT for heavier-duty vehicles is narrowed or closed, we cannot expect many companies to make the transition, and, if required to convert in today’s market, we face more supply chain disruptions, transportation cost increases, and additional inflationary pressure.”
Due to the increase in costs for businesses, the potential inflationary impact on the entire economy per year is between 0.5% and 1%, according to the report. Inflation is already elevated, measuring 3.5% year-over-year in March, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
Increased expense projections differ by state, with class 8 heavy-duty trucks costing 94% more per year in California compared to traditional trucks, due largely to a 501% increase in equipment costs, while cost savings on fuel only amounted to 52%. In Georgia, costs would be 114% higher due to higher equipment costs, labor costs, a smaller payload capacity and more.
The EPA also recently finalized rules mandating that 67% of all light-duty vehicles sold after 2032 be electric or hybrid. Around $1 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act has already been designated to be used by subnational governments in the U.S. to replace some heavy-duty vehicles with EVs, like delivery trucks or school buses.
The Biden administration has also had trouble expanding EV charging infrastructure across the country, despite allotting $7.5 billion for chargers in 2021. Current charging infrastructure frequently has issues operating properly, adding to fears of “range anxiety,” where EV owners worry they will become stranded without a charger.
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