If government can’t even build bridges…
Nipigon Bridge is falling down. So i s government credibility.
A superficially impressive twinning of a single bridge built in 1937, the most expensive bridge ever built in Ontario and the only road link between Eastern and Western Canada except via the United States, it opened on Nov. 29, 2015, and buckled on Jan. 10. It has now been partly reopened by an engineering kluge of uncertain reliability. But how long full repairs will take, or how extensive a renovation is required, is anybody’s guess.
Nobody is yet sure what happened, whether t he problem was with the design, the construction, the site or a freak climatic act of God. But the location, just north of Thunder Bay, is not exactly known for its mellow winters. Nor is mankind unfamiliar with the engineering challenges of cold weather, from Scandinavia to Russia to that other big one that includes the North Pole with the rhythmic three- syllable name.
Why is government credibility involved? Because infrastructure is one of the most basic public responsibilities. Even those highly skeptical of the modern government agenda agree that the state must provide defence, criminal law and key infrastructure, because it is generally impossible to have competing transport networks due to the two- dimensional nature of the Earth’s surface. But if government has difficulty with those basic tasks, it might not be a good time to take on ambitious new ones, and endless debt to fund its soaring ambitions.
The infrastructure projects are becoming ever-more grandiose. Not content with filling potholes, governments promise to transform our lives with mass transit, urban infill, high-speed broadband, whatever is the latest social, as well as physical, engineering trend. Thus the Nipigon bridge is, unsurprisingly, part of the highly touted infrastructure investment in Ontario’s history — the largest ever, we’re told — more than $ 130 billion over a decade, intended not just to pave roads but to “stimulate” the economy, create jobs, reshape urban life in ways we allegedly cannot afford to be without, at any price.
It doesn’t seem to be working very well. And those who doubt the modern overweening government agenda are prone to ask, pointedly, why we should believe the state can arrange our health care, improve our nutrition choices, dictate our retirement choices, lift up the poor, educate us about the joint imperatives of recycling hurtful speech … in short make us healthy, wealthy and wise, when it cannot manage simple tasks like making sure there’s a road between East and West. And whatever the specifics, the buck stops with the state here.
Why wasn’t the bridge twinned decades ago? Why didn’t Queen’s Park make sure the project was designed and executed properly? And where’s the backup plan? It’s all very well to say such ventures are complex, there are unforeseen challenges, it gets mighty cold up Nipigon way and so on. But all these things were obvious ahead of time, when the government was assuring us of its competence. Why didn’t it foresee them in reality as well as rhetorically?
One lane of the bridge has been temporarily reopened by weighing down the section that buckled with 160 concrete beams, each weighing 2,700 kilos. It’s a commendably rapid response to the crisis. But it forces cars to take turns using the single lane, some heavy trucks are still unable to cross and there’s no telling how long it will last or how suddenly it might fail. Meanwhile the Ontario government’s credibility is weighed down by $ 298 billion of debt and a premier who blithely insists the state is so essential that Ontarians can’t afford to not follow its lead.
How much confidence can one have in the basic fiscal structure of, say, the proposed Ontario Pension Plan, let alone its projected long- term beneficial effects, when we cannot count on getting in a car and driving from Toronto to Thunder Bay?