Commentary
In a French farce at a railway station, Ottawa’s city manager abruptly departed two days before a stinging report on the national capital’s disastrous light rail transit project pulled in on schedule. Saying
it was his decision alone and he had no advance knowledge of the LRT inquiry’s findings, he shouted from the carriage window, “I’ve always deeply believed in leadership accountability,” just not for him. Instead, “After almost 38 years of service, it’s time for me to be a friend to me.” Citizens should be so lucky.
As I’ve been warning ever since I read that
classic of boring scariness “Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition” by Bent and the Unpronounceables (a.k.a. Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, or FRB), megaprojects are not a friend to taxpayers. As recently as this August, in this paper, I said it again about the blithe announcement that the Ottawa LRT Western extension would be at least a year late and billions over-budget, as usual, but what can you do, as usual? You can’t stop a train half way, so you keep shovelling money into the hole.
Predictably, the city manager left saying what a great job everyone had done, and a bunch of councillors foolishly sent him on his way with praise. And his pockets full of dough; he
earned $370K a year
plus benefits. Just as Ottawa’s former mayor caught the midnight special after 12 well-paid years, with a pension on whose size city hall gave me a three-bureaucrat ticket to nowhere. We thought he was dodging responsibility for flubbing the convoy protest. Seems he had a better reason for getting out of town… and not by transit.
As for contractors, they keep cashing cheques because what would you do with half a bridge or two-thirds of a stadium? At that point it’s rational to throw good money after bad because you get some value for money on a disappointing project, but literally none if you pay to dismantle the thing and fill in the hole.
In 2008, FBR warned that from roads to rails to facilities, “Cost overrun today is in the same order of magnitude as it was ten, thirty or seventy years ago.” And while it seems nothing is ever learned, the reverse is true: “strong incentives and weak disincentives for cost underestimation … may have taught project promoters … that cost underestimation and overrun pay off.”
In 2022, Ottawa provided 664 more pages of gory details. Including accusing the
construction consortium (yes, they’re in cahoots) of an “unconscionable” decision to mislead the city about timelines, plus “willful and deliberate” withholding of information by the mayor, the city manager, and others about the train failing technical tests. They even used a private social media app to execute what the inquiry called “an end run around proper governance.”
At least something ran on time as intended. Mind you the only person involved in that little circular line still in office is the Ottawa councillor who, um, chaired the city’s transit commission and for some reason voted against a judicial inquiry. (Plus, city council
just voted to boot civilian representatives off the transit commission.)
Inquiry head Justice William Hourigan wrote, “because the conduct was wilful and deliberate, it leads to serious concerns about the good faith of senior City staff and raises questions about where their loyalties lie.” Hourigan called it “deliberate malfeasance,” but others might call it being their own best friends.
As the deceit train derails, the crew are jumping from the windows. Populist Ontario Premier Doug Ford
made the stunning discovery that all was not well in this massively-provincially-subsidized project right around the time it literally went off the rails last fall, with one single train derailment shutting the whole Confederation line for nearly two entire months. The premier called a judicial inquiry after city council voted against one (by 13-10), but
only in November 2021. And now he snarls that the mayor, “the city manager and some other people that worked on it … high-tailed out of there because they knew it was a disaster.”
Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Including the head of OC Transpo (salary $267,300
plus benefits), who for some reason retired in September 2021. But where was Ford, when anyone could see the jig was up?
Especially since he growled “And the people of Ottawa knew it was a disaster.” Then why didn’t he? Besides, when Ottawa Citizen journalist Bruce Deachman
rode the LRT in a shirt mocking the mayor, “Fewer than half [of riders he spoke to] were aware of the inquiry … let alone Commissioner William Hourigan’s scathing report … this week. Not only that, a couple of riders I spoke with had never heard of [Mayor] Jim Watson.”
So the gravy train keeps running, with people who are true friends to themselves travelling first class. As usual.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
