Political brinkmanship gone wrong

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2018 (2829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The $95-million Innovation Centre launched last year by Red River College is — at first blush — one of those rare win-win-win projects.

Billed as the first of its kind in Western Canada, the centre is designed to be a hub for the school, local businesses and other partners to collaborate and commercialize next-generation startup ideas and technology, while also ensuring students are “job-ready” for next-generation jobs.

It is also designed to be the latest jewel in the college’s growing Exchange District campus, a development that has brought life and people to one of the most vibrant and unique areas of the city.

Finally, it was supposed to deliver much needed political capital to the federal Liberal government, which agreed to provide $41 million in cash, and the provincial Progressive Conservative government, which supplied a loan guarantee to the college for the remainder of project costs.

When you have a project that is so embraced by so many different stakeholders, it’s nearly impossible to see how anyone could screw this up. Emphasis on the “nearly.”

This week, the Free Press reported that the college had stopped tendering after Ottawa indicated the project would have to be “substantially complete” by November 2018. With the prospect of having the federal government pull out before all of its money could be committed, the school felt it had to pump the brakes. Unless the deadline is extended, the college says the project could be scuttled.

Let’s look at all the givens in this equation. Given that the two levels of government approved the project last June, and given its ambitious parameters, and given the widespread support it has from all quarters, why wouldn’t we be able to solve the simple problem of a deadline that, by all appearances, was never realistic?

Longtime political observers know that taxpayer-funded projects of this kind — even those that are considered win-win-win — are always susceptible to the changing winds of federal-provincial relations.

Let’s back up a bit and look at the origins of this current deadline crunch.

This project is funded under a federal program aimed at making strategic investments in post-secondary schools across the country.

The Innovation Centre was one of the largest projects approved. The original deadline for completion of projects in this program stream was April 2018.

The federal government and provincial governments publicly committed to funding the Innovation Centre when it was unveiled in April 2017.

However, those commitments were not formalized until June, largely, sources said, because the province was in a holding pattern while it undertook a massive review of its capital investments.

With only 10 months between funding approval and the original deadline for completion, Ottawa agreed to push back the original deadline to November 2018 for this and other projects across the country caught in the same dilemma. That still only gave the college 17 months to finish a project that is, from a design and engineering perspective, quite complex.

However, when the college went back to Ottawa for another extension, there was push-back.

Negotiations are reportedly continuing, according to the school, but there was not enough progress to justify the awarding of several key construction contracts.

This situation is remarkable, in and of itself, because the federal government has already contributed $14 million to the Innovation Centre. And because Ottawa regularly delays infrastructure spending, pushing off its contributions years into the future.

What is the federal strategy here?

One school of thought suggests that Ottawa is involved in a little brinkmanship, holding firm to an unreasonable deadline to punish Manitoba for delays in approving funding and its decision to only provide a loan guarantee.

When one level of government puts up cash for a project, it typically likes to see the other level of government respond in kind. Failure to honour that tradition typically breeds hostility, a commodity found in abundance in the often-troubled relationship between the Manitoba government and federal government.

Perhaps the province did complicate this matter by dragging its feet and holding back on a cash contribution. However, nothing the province has done justifies the federal decision to put the project in jeopardy.

Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr, Manitoba’s senior government MP, reportedly still supports the Innovation Centre, although you wouldn’t know that from any public statement he has made about the deadline stalemate. The college says Carr is advocating for the project, but his silence on this dispute is worrisome.

Federal-provincial finger-pointing aside, it’s clear that Ottawa has the unilateral authority to solve the deadline crunch. It would be better for all involved if that came sooner, rather than later; delays will only serve to drive up the final cost of the project, which serves no one.

Even with all that has happened, it’s impossible to imagine the federal government walking away from this project. However, it is possible to imagine a scenario where, thanks to needless intransigence, Ottawa gets almost no credit for making a $41-million investment in downtown Winnipeg.

If that scenario comes to fruition, federal Liberals in this city will only have themselves to blame.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca