Sunny ways and days for N.S. Liberals

Twinned highway between New Glasgow and Antigonish is a vote getter

It’s not every day the prime minister shows up at your party – and with a gift no less – so it must have been an important occasion.

Justin Trudeau was in Central Nova last week with a notional $90 million to top up the $195 million Premier Stephen McNeil had on the table to twin the highway between New Glasgow and Antigonish.

The chief of the Barney’s River Fire Department, Joe MacDonald was there to hear the announcement he’s been demanding for years. The highway will be twinned and the carnage his department has rushed towards in hopes of helping save lives ends when the job’s done in 2024.

That’s fast work, considering no surveys or anything else have happened yet on the ground between Sutherland’s River in Pictou County and Antigonish. The provincial Transportation Department estimates it would take 12 or 13 years to build the road using traditional highway construction methods.

It wasn’t Justin’s $90 million that lit a fire under the project. That happened when the province decided a private partner will finance, design, build, and maintain the road.

Nova Scotia’s notable experience with a private partnership of this type came with the Cobequid Pass, the province’s only toll road if you exclude the two bridges over Halifax Harbour.

And exclude them we do, because for reasons that defy logic, Nova Scotians are okay paying a toll to drive a mile on a provincially-owned and operated bridge but find it deeply objectionable to pay a toll to drive almost 50 kilometres on the best-maintained highway in the province.

The Cobequid Pass was built in just 20 months. The new section of the 104 will get done quickly too – after the private partner is selected by a competitive process next year – because time is money.

The big difference between the Cobequid Pass and the unnamed new road is who pays for it and how. The Cobequid Pass is user-pay, hence the toll booth. Taxpayers will foot the yet-to-be-determined bill for the New Glasgow-Antigonish twinned highway.

The $285-million price tag covered by the federal and provincial funding announcements a week ago is based on the department’s best guess of what it will cost to twin 28 kilometres and build 10 more from scratch.

A UNB engineering prof says the province could save a mountain of money and still make that stretch of the TransCanada safe without twinning it. He offered both suggestions on how to do that and further evidence that academics have no place in politics, at least not on the winning side.

The twinned highway is a vote getter. Passing lanes and the like are neutral at best, and a toll booth anywhere along that route would spell political extinction for every provincial Liberal MLA east of New Glasgow – there are four and they’re all in cabinet – and put three federal Liberals at risk just for spite.

So, the prime minister and the premier were out in the brilliant Nova Scotia summer sun, but they were basking in the warm glow of a pure political winner.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents Nova Scotia’s highways workers is a tad put out that the private outfit will also maintain the road, but the department has provided assurances that no highways workers’ jobs are at risk, so even CUPE’s critique is somewhat muted.

The capitalist collective of investors and contractors that wins the contract will be capable of putting together the financing and doing everything from geotechnical surveys to painting the lines and plowing the snow.

Publicly-employed highways engineering-types will approve each step, inspect the work and undoubtedly annoy the heck out of the private contractors, but that’s what they’re paid for and it will get built into the cost anyway.

The critical public role comes later, paying for the road plus whatever tidy profit the winning proponent gets away with. Nova Scotians won’t know for some time whether it is cheaper, more expensive, or a wash for taxpayers, but the province has run a battery of tests that tell it there is value here in going the private route.

But paying for the road is tomorrow’s problem. Today the sun is shining.

Jim Vibert, a journalist and writer for longer than he cares to admit, consulted or worked for five Nova Scotia governments. He now keeps a close and critical eye on provincial and regional powers.