Government fumbles the infrastructure file
After 12 years of the Saskatchewan Party working to convince us that they are the ones who should be contracted to deal with this fixer-upper of a province, they may only now be beginning to appreciate how tough it is to be in the renovation business.
The Sask. Party government arguably chose wisely when it defined its governance purpose as taking on the “infrastructure deficit” left behind by the previous NDP government. It’s a wonderful way to spend tax dollars freely and leave behind monuments while, surprisingly, turning the former NDP administration’s “austerity/ debt-fighting” brand into a negative.
One of the things Saskatchewan people most detest is the image held by some outsiders that this province is a dump, a place in need of repair and/or replacement, and where penny-pinching and cutting corners have gone on for too long.
Unfortunately, though, what may now be emerging is new narrative of a government overspending on some projects while perhaps still not meeting the needs elsewhere.
Consider the $1.9-billion cost of the Regina Bypass — a project that started with an arguably-more reasonable $500-million cost, but one that has quadrupled in price. The government insists this is due to an expanded vision with additional overpasses on the west side to link into the Global Transportation Hub, itself a conceptual plan proving to be increasingly problematic given the GTH’S own failings.
What is now clear is the inflated price of the bypass has as much to do with the impossibly complex financial arrangement of a public/ private partnership with its excessively expensive maintenance agreements.
What needs far more consideration is how such deferred costs are contributing to Saskatchewan’s long-term public debt: $21.39 billion as of 2019-20 budget mid-year update that’s now double Saskatchewan’s $10.48-billion public debt in 2007-08 when the Saskatchewan Party took over government.
By all measure, the Sask. Party’s calculations have been based on the shortterm, four-year political cycle, risking that voters’ appreciation of the renovated or bright and shiny would outweigh concern for the long-term costs. It’s not all that unreasonable. We all have mortgages paying for the home we want and we sometimes borrow to renovate those homes so they are the way we want them.
But two things perhaps unanticipated by the Sask. Party government are the ceaseless demand out there for the new and improved, and how government is likely feeding the expectations that those public demands can and will be easily met. Really, it’s an impossibility that, inevitably, is going to lead to some level of public frustration and disappointment.
The latest example of such frustration emerges from an NDP freedom of information request on needed maintenance that disclosed such gems as an office at St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon being so sloped staff members have to hold onto tables to keep their chairs from rolling away.
Sure, government is a bit like your house or mine, in that it’s likely pretty easy to find something in need of replacement or repair if you look hard enough. But any governing party should see itself as the maintenance guy. And there’s little more irritating than a maintenance worker bragging that they are better than the other person, when the worker should instead just be fixing things.
In the case of Saskatchewan Health, the Starphoenix’s
Zac Vescera reported that the province’s hospitals haven’t had a maintenance audit since 2013, and the $2.2-billion estimated costs at the time has ballooned to $3.3 billion. In the meantime, we’ve instead spent $1.9 billion on a Regina bypass that is four times more than what we thought it would originally cost.
In fairness, the Sask.
Party does deserve credit for investing nearly $1.6 billion in health system capital projects ($346 million on health infrastructure maintenance alone) since 2007.
But that’s cold comfort to those having to contend with the sloping floor at St. Paul’s Hospital or even the leaky roof at the new Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford.
With never-ending needs for schools and roads, the Sask. Party government’s infrastructure priorities may be getting the kind of voter scrutiny it wasn’t anticipating.