Commentary
In a French farce at a railway station, Ottawa’s city manager abruptly departed two days before a stinging report on the national capital’s disastrous light rail transit project pulled in on schedule. Saying it was his decision alone and he had no advance knowledge of the LRT inquiry’s findings, he shouted from the carriage window, “I’ve always deeply believed in leadership accountability,” just not for him. Instead, “After almost 38 years of service, it’s time for me to be a friend to me.” Citizens should be so lucky.
As I’ve been warning ever since I read that classic of boring scariness “Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition” by Bent and the Unpronounceables (a.k.a. Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius, and Werner Rothengatter, or FRB), megaprojects are not a friend to taxpayers. As recently as this August, in this paper, I said it again about the blithe announcement that the Ottawa LRT Western extension would be at least a year late and billions over-budget, as usual, but what can you do, as usual? You can’t stop a train half way, so you keep shovelling money into the hole….