Opinion: Party reverses course after stalling hospital expansion, but won’t say if cost overruns were reined in
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VICTORIA — The New Democrats have abandoned any commitment to fiscal discipline with the announcement on the eve of the election call that they were reactivating the expansion of Burnaby Hospital.
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The Phase 2 expansion was put on hold earlier this year as part of a supposedly “tough” fiscal plan to rein in some capital projects as wildly overbudget.
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Leading the charge then was Bowinn Ma, minister of a new Ministry of Infrastructure with a mandate to get a handle on planning for hospitals, long-term care home and other capital projects.
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“The province’s fiscal situation isn’t a secret to anyone, right?” Ma explained to Alec Lazenby of Postmedia last spring.
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“Given the deficit that we are currently operating here in B.C., we have been forced to take a really hard look at spending and investments, and plans for the next several years.
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“One of the factors that we looked at was whether a project was really ready to go. Burnaby Hospital was one of those projects that was not ready to go. The design had come in hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.”
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The government had already spent $45 million on the Phase 2 expansion. Still the contract with the would-be builder was cancelled and the project was sent back to the drawing board a redesign to fit within the original $1.8 billion budget.
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Also placed on hold — the government’s preferred euphemism was “re-pacing” — were a half dozen long-term care homes costed at an exorbitant $1.8 million a bed.
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“That’s exactly what the Ministry of Infrastructure was created for,” Ma explained. “Part of the work that is now underway is to actually take a pause on the way we’ve been doing things before to be better able to deliver those projects at a scale reasonable to taxpayers.”
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So said Ma last spring.
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But there she was Monday, flanked by a quintet of NDP MLAs for Burnaby, announcing the day before David Eby called the snap election that the hospital expansion was back on.
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“Following a brief pause to allow a lot of fine work to occur by a lot of people, the Burnaby Hospital redevelopment project is moving forward with a renewed plan,” said Ma.
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Moreover the province was putting up $210 million to expedite a start of construction as early as next year.
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Ma said nothing about how this fiscal miracle had been accomplished, other than to claim that “many of these choices were difficult to make.”
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There was nothing difficult about it. All it took was the pending election call coupled with lobbying by those five NDP MLAs for Burnaby.
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Ma did not explain what the re-pacing had done to the original $1.8 billion budget. Neither did she cost out the added promise that the project would now be built under one of the NDP’s union-favouring project labour agreements, suspected of adding 10 to 20 per cent to the cost of construction.
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The government’s abandonment of the hold-the-line approach on capital projects marked the second year in which the NDP had surrendered on an exercise in supposed fiscal discipline.
