GRAHN: Vancouver’s $3.8 billion sewage palace

Charlie Grahn worked in procurement for some of British Columbia’s largest companies. He teaches public procurement for Supply Chain Canada, and management at the Melville School of Business.Last year, Metro Vancouver taxpayers got their wake-up call — and the bill — for the slow-motion trainwreck that is the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant. Once pitched as a modest $700 million facility with a 2020 ribbon-cutting, it has since metastasized into a $3.8 billion fiasco limping toward a 2030 maybe-completion.The reward for homeowners? An extra $600 a year in property taxes — for the next 30 years — all paid with after-tax income. Not a single head has rolled. Not a single name has been named.Instead, Metro Vancouver reached for its favourite smoke bomb: the “independent audit.” Rolled out like a silver bullet — a noble gesture of transparency to calm the peasants. Never mind that audits aren’t cheap. Or fast. Or conclusive..EDITORIAL: A sole-ful disregard for the taxpayer.Then came the kicker. In the time-honoured tradition of burying bad news, Metro Vancouver quietly announced — late on a Friday, summer afternoon — that the audit was “on hold.” Not cancelled, mind you. Just quietly euthanized in a press release few would read. The transparency plan, it turns out, was as illusory as the budget.Now we’re left with the worst of all worlds: a ballooning boondoggle, a tax hike masquerading as infrastructure, and an accountability process shoved under the rug before it even began.Spoiler alert, this isn’t oversight. It’s obfuscation. And we’re all footing the bill..Last April, Metro Vancouver took a victory lap, proudly announcing it had found $1 billion in savings. Some media repeated it, unblinking. But peel back the headline, and it’s clear: this wasn’t a windfall — it was a stall.The so-called “savings” came from deferring capital projects. Deferrals don’t save money. They just kick costs down the road, where inflation and inefficiencies quietly make everything more expensive. Cynical and shameless.After the project stopped, the finger-pointing began. Metro Vancouver and its prime contractor, Spanish infrastructure giant Acciona, filed duelling sob stories in BC Supreme Court. It reads like kabuki — all legalese and reputational damage control. The third act is always the same: interest fades, settlements get sealed, lawyers get paid, and no one learns a thing..FLETCHER: BC LNG the poster child for Carney’s recovery plan.And that original construction contract? Metro Vancouver only released it after a Freedom of Information prybar was applied. At 5,500+ pages, it makes NASA’s entire deal with Rockwell to build the Space Shuttle look like a sticky note. But the heft wasn’t about rigour — it was about optics. If the contract looked dense enough, maybe no one would notice it was built on fantasy.Beneath the paper mountain lies the truth: this was never just a treatment plant. It was a vanity project — a monument to public officials’ “vision.” Forget practicality. This thing was going to sing. Rooftop gardens, reclaimed water features, curated indigenous art, public tours, rentable event space. Because who hasn’t stood before Vancouver’s splendour — the mountains, the beaches, the forests — and thought, “This wedding needs to be held atop a sewage plant”?That’s not vision — it’s a bureaucrat’s fever dream. In the scramble to build a showpiece, officials lost sight of the one job this facility was supposed to do: treat wastewater. It’s the same mindset that leads a city to boast about painting one rainbow crosswalk — while leaving 600 others used by schoolchildren dangerously faded. The headline gets printed, the photo op posted, and the basics forgotten..Court filings reveal one tiny problem: wastewater in North Vancouver contains high concentrations of chlorides — salts that turn rooftop Shangri-Las into rooftop moonscapes. Acciona was hired to build a treatment plant, not reinvent desalination. Predictably, the company now claims the job was “impossible.” In fairness, trying to green-roof a plant with salty effluent is like trying to wallpaper a waterfall.And this isn’t an isolated incident.Canada’s public works graveyard is getting crowded. Look at Seaspan, still trying to deliver two naval supply ships — ten years in, $2.2 billion deep, and counting. Even before winning the job, it needed subsidies just to bid. Then last summer, on the Friday before the BC Day weekend, Ottawa quietly tossed in another $1 billion, citing vague “COVID-19 impacts.” Translation: we blew the budget, and you’re stuck with the tab. Well, at least Canada is inching closer to its 2% NATO defence target..EDITORIAL: Alberta’s bold stand: Citizenship markers on provincial IDs and the defence of provincial rights .Meanwhile, across the inlet, Oxford Properties broke ground on the 37-storey “The Stack” in 2019 and — also during COVID-19 — delivered Canada’s first zero-carbon high-rise on time and on budget. What’s the difference? Oxford has a board. That board demands accountability. Shareholders expect results. And so, they get them.Public procurement, on the other hand, shrugs at failure. Worse, it expects it. The 16-kilometre SkyTrain extension announced in 2020? Supposed to cost $4 billion. By last summer? $6 billion. The new Surrey hospital? Up from $1.7 billion to $2.7 billion. Richmond and Cowichan? Another $1 billion each. And just wait — the Massey Tunnel replacement news is coming.These costs aren’t theoretical — they’re already being paid. BC now carries more than $125 billion in debt, with an aging population whose care needs grow more complex by the year. These are people promised quality healthcare decades ago — yet 4,500 of them died last year waiting for it. Buildings are easy to announce. It’s the care inside them that matters. Every runaway project siphons resources from services that actually save lives. And no one blinks..That’s the real issue — how routine this has all become. We’re normalizing incompetence. We’re training contractors to submit bogus estimates, knowing public lifelines await. We’re turning procurement into a poker game — and rewarding the boldest bluff.It’s dumb.At this point, we might as well admit we’re running infrastructure like an “infinite monkey” experiment — the one French mathematician Émile Borel used to explain probability. Give enough monkeys enough typewriters and enough time, he said, and they’ll eventually hammer out Shakespeare.Except here, the typewriters are mounds of cash.So expect things to get built. But don’t hold your breath for Macbeth.Charlie Grahn worked in procurement for some of British Columbia’s largest companies. He teaches public procurement for Supply Chain Canada, and management at the Melville School of Business.