All of Ottawa seems to think $5 billion is a reasonable figure for refurbishing Parliament's Centre Block. It isn't
One of the most preposterous and dead-obvious falsehoods ever to gain purchase in Canadian politics is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves. “How could it cost $2 billion to demolish Montreal Olympic Stadium, experts ask,” was the National Post’s headline on a Canadian Press article. And the answer is, it can’t. Of course it can’t. Duh.
There are challenges with the Big O that most stadiums don’t have: The Métro runs beneath it, for one, so you can’t just implode the bastard. And the use of pre-stressed concrete in the stadium construction means it’s full of potential energy. “It will behave like a bomb, essentially,” McGill civil engineering professor Daniele Malomo told CP. (Please go on, professor!)
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Taking these special factors into account, does it explain why it would cost 100 times more to demolish the Big O than RFK Stadium in Washington? Eighty times more than to demolish the original Yankee Stadium, in one of the most expensive cities in the world to build or demolish anything? Twenty-five per cent more than to demolish the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and build its replacement, Mercedes-Benz Stadium — 75,000 seats, retractable roof — on an adjacent lot?
Of course it doesn’t. The Canadian Press apparently couldn’t find anyone who doesn’t work for the Quebec government — bureaucrat, minister or premier — who thinks the figure makes any sense at all.
I’m sure I’m not the only person over the years to have joked that the figure only made sense when you considered the mafia surcharge that Quebec traditionally paid on all construction projects. Turns out it wasn’t so funny: Much of the received wisdom about how the stadium can and cannot be demolished comes from a report by Seguin Engineering, which CP reports “ceased commercial operations in 2014, one year after its president told a public inquiry about a system of collusion and kickbacks in provincial government contracting.”
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Even at that, Seguin only estimated the cost of demolishing the stadium at roughly $1 billion (in 2024 dollars).
It took fairly extreme circumstances to chase this absurdity into the light. The Quebec government proposes to spend $870 million — itself a greater cost than many start-from-scratch stadiums — on various improvements to the Big O, including yet another roof. Essentially campaigning under the banner of the sunk-cost fallacy, it insists the alternative, demolition, is simply too expensive to contemplate.
The problem is that Montreal simply doesn’t need a stadium the size of the Big O, and it never will again, and Quebecers seem to be cottoning on to that more than ever before. You don’t keep a 65,000-seat stadium standing to host the Grey Cup, Real Madrid and Metallica every few years. Trade shows, monster truck rallies and the other few things the stadium hosts can be hosted elsewhere.
But Canadian politics is shot through with problems like the Big O, and figures almost as absurd.
Auditor general Karen Hogan confirmed Monday that, no, obviously, the ArriveCAN app shouldn’t have cost in the neighbourhood of $60 million. Anyone who even halfway defended that looked like an idiot at the time, and more so today. It cost that much because friendly civil servants distributed outrageous sums of money to friendly contractors, who did little to nothing except take a cut and pass the work on to friendly subcontractors, with little to no oversight.
“(Canada Border Services Agency) employees who were involved in the ArriveCAN project were invited by vendors to dinners and other activities,” Horgan reported. “(CBSA’s) Code of Conduct requires employees to advise their supervisors of all offers of gifts or hospitality … We found no evidence that these employees informed their supervisors.”
(An aside: “Dinners and other activities” were illegal in Ontario during the app’s development.)
With a decision on the fate of 24 Sussex Drive potentially near to hand — finally — the NCC has updated its advice for what various prime ministerial accommodation options might entail. One fairly compelling idea that’s on the table is simply to stand pat. The prime minister and his brood seem to live quite comfortably in Rideau Cottage. We could make that the new official residence and figure out what to do with the pug-ugly, historically unimportant and decrepit 24 Sussex as a separate project.
“Under this option, the NCC would invest to address lacking residential infrastructure … kitchen, laundry, garage and staff offices,” The Canadian Press reported.
Oh would it now? Why is that? Will the Poilievre family go hungry, should the improvements not be made? Will the children head to preschool in rags, covered in grass and chocolate pudding stains? Of course not.
If the NCC had any record of spending a reasonable amount of money on anything, it might be easier to shrug and let them get on with arranging more suitable permanent accommodations for prime ministers and their households. But they don’t. This is the outfit that wanted us to believe renovating 24 Sussex would have to cost the better part of $40 million. It spent $8 million on a barn at Harrington Lake.
The NCC’s current estimate for the refurbishment of Parliament’s Centre Block stands between $4.5 billion and $5 billion. This seems to be universally accepted in Ottawa as a reasonable figure.
It isn’t. It’s cuckoo-bananas. MPs have complained for years that they haven’t been given enough information to judge one way or the other.
A strange Canadian instinct compels some of us to roll our eyes at these questions and complaints. “Tsk. So parochial. So unworldly!”
Balls to that. It’s unworldly and parochial not to question and complain when governments feed us nonsense. Let’s make 2024 the year Canadians unapologetically call BS. If these figures are defensible, then let’s hear a proper defence for once.
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