Pallister’s political hyperbole ignores challenge of building the East Side Road

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/09/2016 (3280 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister was going to make sure nobody missed his point.

Pallister convened a news conference Tuesday to comment on a report from auditor general Norm Ricard on the East Side Road Authority, the arm’s-length Crown agency responsible for managing the construction of an all-weather road up the east side of lake Winnipeg. The report flagged a wide range of accounting and oversight problems at ESRA, which was officially dismantled earlier this month.

Put in the simplest terms, ESRA was good at living up to its obligations under community development agreements and getting money out to contractors and First Nations communities, but very bad at ensuring the money was being spent in the appropriate way. A report like that is dynamite for a man who continues to hold a licence as a financial planner, and who is a self-professed accountability nut. True to form, Pallister wasted no time in leaping on the former NDP government for its incompetence and lack of fiscal accountability.

Pallister accused the NDP of wasting taxpayer money and squandering opportunities to improve the life of First Nation communities that will be linked by the new road. He went beyond the concerns raised by the auditor general and accused the NDP of political skullduggery by signing a raft of agreements with east side First Nations in the weeks before the spring election without proper consideration or authority.

Pallister said the auditor’s report represented the “harshest condemnation of government practices” that he had ever seen.

OK, it’s time for everyone to take a breath.

There is no doubt that ESRA was a mess. As the auditor general showed, it appeared to have little capacity or enthusiasm for financial control and oversight. Much as has been the case with other partnerships involving First Nations, there was insufficient information showing the money provided to those communities was being used for the purposes for which it was intended. Add to that ESRA’s botching of the federal environmental review — Ottawa has refused to approve the East Side Road plan as is — and you’ve got what appears to be negligence on several fronts.

Does that make this a scandal? No, not really. ESRA is not a role model for best practices in Crown agency operations. But it’s important to note that the challenge given to ESRA was both unique and enormous.

Building roads in northern or remote regions is more expensive than building in the south. The costs of materials, labour and a difficult environment make it a logistical and engineering nightmare.

As well, the ESRA mandate included funding for First Nations to train individuals and help others start businesses that would provide goods or services to the project. This added a 35 per cent premium to the basic costs of construction. This was an entity that, bottom line, was bad at its job. Pallister is applying a purely partisan lens to represent the auditor general’s report as the most damning examination of government spending, ever.

Pallister argued over and over again at his news conference that ESRA was not effective. In actual fact, he does not know whether ESRA accomplished its dual goals of building a road and supporting First Nations to become active contributors to the construction and maintenance.

No one expects the Tory government to spend the money on an audit now to find out whether the money had any impact on the communities affected. However, on a go-forward basis, it’s important to remember that not knowing whether ESRA was effective is not the same as it being ineffective.

Take away the political hyperbole, and several important points become clear after examining the report and making a commitment to memorizing a dizzying array of acronyms.

First, it was a miscalculation to think the Red River Floodway Authority, the precursor to ESRA, could take on the east-side road project.

The floodway project was primarily a transaction between private contractors, unions and the federal and provincial governments. There were training programs incorporated into the plan, but this was really about getting a bunch of private companies to make a big hole in the ground a little bit bigger.

The East Side Road, on the other hand, was a complex cocktail of heavy construction, economic development and social engineering. ESRA was not just responsible for paying contractors, it was asked to maximize economic benefits for the communities to be linked by the road. It all proved, quite clearly, to be too much for the folks who oversaw the successful expansion of the floodway.

The second point revealed by the report is the enormous cost of doing everything the auditor general has recommended in terms of accounting and oversight. Pallister has promised to get the east-side road built for less money and with greater spinoff benefits for First Nation communities but he has clearly underestimated the cost of proceeding without ESRA.

ESRA’s responsibilities have been rolled into the Manitoba Infrastructure Department, and some of the former staff from the authority will be brought in to help move things along. However, blowing up ESRA rather than fixing it will likely drive up the total cost of the project from earlier estimates.

Building an all-weather road to link communities east of Lake Winnipeg is a policy issue now, not a political issue. If the premier can find a way of doing it better, cheaper and faster — and in reality, any of those would do — then he will most definitely deserve all the credit.

If — and it’s a big “if” — the road gets built.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

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