Megaproject Mega-Farce
Pea Seas, Liberals fight over Lib delusions
Tony Wakeham got the top-level information on Andrew Furey’s fantasy health campus megaproject in a briefing during the transition and a week or so later, after Barry Petten was sworn in as deputy premier and minister whose department was supposed to turn Furey’s brain-fart into something real, Petten got more details.
Cost: $8.4 billion.
Give or take 30%.
But with megaprojects in Newfoundland and Labrador, there’s never any take. Projects never get cheaper. They just get bigger. Taxpayers give. More and more.
So at the upper end, the working estimate officials used for Furey’s folly would be closer to $11 billion.
As with their Muskrat Falls project that they couldn’t pay for either, the Liberals had no way of paying for this megaproject.
Petten shaved a few bucks off the total when he spoke to reporters, used $10 billion in the newser when he told the world the farce was over. Done. Had been DOA all along. Dead-on-arrival.
More accurate estimate was $11 billion for the hospital to replace St. Clare’s, the stroke centre, bits and pieces around those, plus parking garage, furniture, lights, and all the equipment, including the high-tech computers and software to run the medical care.
$11 billion. $10.92 to be exact.
That’s just the planning figure. The round numbers.
Not included: road work, water and sewer, including the new water tower the government would pay for but that would also make the ex-Crown land the Furey Experience didn’t buy back from the politically-connected Hickmans way more valuable for future development. Big win for one of the wealthiest families in Newfoundland and Labrador.Also not included in that cost would be daycare for the children of staff, a hostel for families of patients, laundry, and other add-ons.
Let the thing go ahead and you would hit $15 billion easily - the cost of Muskrat Falls, all-up, as far as we know today - without breaking a sweat.
There was no money to pay for.
There had been no plans for it because a replacement for St. Clare’s was not on the list of major health projects the government officials already had. There were higher priorities.
This project was a pet.
A pet brainfart.
People behind megaprojects under-estimate the risk and costs and over-estimate the benefits often to the point of making ludicrous claims.
That’s basically what international experience shows and it is definitely what local experience shows just in this century.
Long before he appeared in the Muskrat Falls inquiry, readers of these e-scribbles learned about Bent Flyvbjerg in 2005 with talk of the Stunnel, which was both a Danny Williams brainfart and one the Liberals endorsed again in 2015, just like they wrapped their arms around Muskrat Falls rather than fix it. Flyvbjerg is the guy who came up with that over/under – estimate thing after studying hundreds of crackpot ideas around the world. There might have been another inquiry had this nonsense gone ahead, but not only did seen or heads prevail and save us cash, they saved us the embarrassment of having the mega projects guru come back to explain to us again how these things are just crackpot notions.
Disconnected is a word used too often for comfort in this corner, but it is a real world to describe real things, like the disconnect from reality the Andrew Furey Experience cast has. Fred Hutton, the guy who lied about land and costwhen he was part of the announcement for it in 2024 yeah told reporters last week that things “have increased in cost in the last couple of years, obviously. But not since October. said. “The cost was still being worked on, but it wasn’t $12 billion or $10 billion.”
Yeah it was, Fred. The numbers Barry Petten used last week came from the transition briefing, which means they were done up while Fred was still in Cabinet. The working estimate was $8.4 billion with the likelihood of another 30% on top of that, which is how you get to $11 billion. If you think you saw Fred‘s nose grow last week, you’re probably right.
To tell you how reasonable that $11 billion number is, just look at megaprojects like this that we’ve already seen in this province. They go up by way more than $30 percent, especially since this project was a brainfart with no prep work. Politicians love to pile on even more bits to it - like the bouncy castle - all of which would add to the cost. They did it with this project before it was even started. First there was a hospital. Then there was a stroke center. Then there was an exercise centre that wound up being stuck under a bouncy castle.
Sarah Stoodley, these days the opposition finance critic, told reporters last week that the decision to scrap projects, especially the hospital that never existed, shows the new Pea Sea government does not expect to have the money to pay for them.
No duh.
There was no money when Sarah and her crowd announced it. ButBarry and his bunch given up hope, said Stoodley, hope of signing the marvelous MOU, where all the money is. “The Minister of Finance could reasonably be expecting the first two years of payments coming up shortly, and the fact that they’re coming out now saying there’s a lot of stuff they’re not doing and they’re cancelling, tells me that they’ve given up hope.”
There’s an old saying: live in hope. Due in despair. We don’t need Sarah’s kind of hope, which is just wildly irresponsible.
But Sarah didn’t stop there. She made it partisan. “You can’t just cancel all the Liberal projects,” Stoodley said while Fred Hutton looked on.
Well, actually, Sarah, they can. They got elected to make their own decisions. Plus they were “Liberal projects.” They were supposed to be government projects not Grit projects or Pea Sea projects. Looking at it as partisan tells the rest of us just how shagged up Liberal thinking was while they could make decisions. If you hauled out a map of the northeast Avalon there’s no better place for a new hospital, Stoodley said without explaining whether there was a need for a new hospital that would cost as much as Muskrat Falls, let alone the bouncy castle to go next to it or the theatre in downtown Sin Jawns that Petten also stopped.
Stoodley is the shadow finance minister which is just as well because she has a shadowy grasp of money let alone the real world the rest of us live in. There is no money at the front of the deal the Andrew Furey Experience signed right before he skedaddled, although both Fred and Sarah kept talking about it like it wasn’t just another lie. Not a really expensive version of the provincial logos on some fourth ranked Brit footie team. None. There was never a billion dollars a year as Stoodley’s crowd claim and the deal itself, had it ever been signed, tagged the first $5.0 billion in advance payments for post-2041 electricity was NALCOR’s equity stake should Quebec have decided to go ahead with Gull Island.
So no. There was no money in the deal even if it existed and certainly not enough to cover Muskrat Falls (still not working properly or as intended) and this new Muskrat Hospital and and and. Too many governments after 2003 have tried to spend the same dollar twice or thrice or even four times. That’s how we got into the state of being not a mere billion short on this year’s budget but at least $2.0 billion in cash, all of which would be new debt. The whole time Stoodley was in Cabinet, first under Dwight Ball, then under the Andrew Furey experience and then the short stint with Hogan, the public debt went up by billions each year. Not pretend billions. Real billions. The kind taxpayers have to pay for.Almost as much debt every year just in overspending as the new hospital would have cost had it been built, most of it just in the Furey Hogan years. Two of the people responsible for that were in front of the cameras last week telling you about the supposed injustice of a cancelled fairytale hospital and they expected you to believe despite their history.
The thing we should notice about all this is the projects that Stoodley and Hutton and Jim Dinn, the Dipper boss cry about didn’t exist anyway. No plans. No concrete anything. Indeed, the only thing that was real was the money paid to political friends of the Andrew Furey Experience, then doing business as the Liberal government in Newfoundland and Labrador, for land the government didn’t need even if it were to build a hospital or anything else on out on Kenmount Road.
“This was all a very large plan to take care of many municipal and provincial needs of that whole area of the northeast Avalon,” Stoodley claimed. VOCM noted that Stoodley talked up the supposed wider benefit: ““Stoodley says there are 30,000 people living in the immediate vicinity of Kenmount Crossing and the hospital project would have meant more than just the facility itself, it would have also resulted in improved infrastructure to the area. She says Paradise needs new roadways, and the Elizabeth Park area is in need of a new water tower.”
There’s that add-on, pile-on thing Fred ignored when denying the project was not going to cost $11 billion or more. Notice he never talked about what number he had when he was in Cabinet.
If he told the truth, it would be $8.4 billion.
Politically, this was an easy choice for the Pea Seas. figments of Liberal imaginations with little work done on them. It’s easy to kill off stuff that doesn’t exist but that would have only added more to the already over-stressed government accounts. Politically it doesn’t hurt either since all their support is from outside the metro Sin Jawns area. The Liberal whining doesn’t affect where their core votes came from.
To make it worse for the Liberals, their media lines just reinforce the Pea Seas and undermine any potential the Liberals have to rebuild among people who aren’t Townies. They remind people of why they voted out the Liberals in the first place. Unlike Fred and Sarah and Bernie, people remember the horror show in the house of Assembly when this scheme exploded like a pressurized can of dog turd. The Liberals seem to be following the ideapushed by wannabe leader and premier John Whelan among othersthat since the Liberals only lost by a handful of votes, they can easily knock off what they think is a weak government. That’s the political theory behind the aggressive Liberal attacks since in opposition, as ludicrous as all of them are.
What the Liberals don’t get is that they lost the election because they had no idea what was going on. Not a clue.Their polling was wildly incompetent and the entire Liberal campaign - from Hogan, through Melissa Royle Critch beyond Joy Buckle down to the doorsteps - the entire gaggle had no idea who was voting for them or not voting for them. Partway through the campaign, Liberal candidates started to freelance their own campaign messages as it became obvious that even the former base of the provincial Liberals they couldn’t hang out the seats. A party that was based in rural Newfoundland and Labrador had flipped entirely to become a half assed giggle gaggle of townies. That fundamental failure of the entire party leadership let John Hogan take weekends off and let Boom Boom Bernie and others talk about sweeping a huge majority that existed only in their own imaginations.
Just like the hospital
Just like the Legault scam’s billions and billions.
Just like the bouncey castle.
Just like the theatre.
And just like the fictitious $300 million deficit that was actually billions in real cash.
Sorry.
That wasn’t a delusion.
That was a lie.
Between delusions and lies, the Liberals had nothing else. They have nothing else.
If they want to hang on to what seats they have now, let alone ever challenge the Pea Seas for power again, they need to ditch delusions and lies.
They didn’t work before they won’t work now.
If you have not read Bent Flyvbjerg’s book “How Big Things Get Done” I highly recommend it, even for non project managers.
And we also have the mayor of Paradise blind sided and troubled that the scrapping of the hospital will prolong traffic issues and congestions in the Town