The following op-ed, by ICBA President and CEO Chris Gardner, first ran in The Vancouver Sun on Thursday, June 25.
When British Columbians first started talking about replacing the George Massey Tunnel, it was the early 2000s. A child born then is now old enough to have finished school and started a career, losing countless hours in soul-crushing traffic. If the tunnel does opens in the mid-2030s, that person will likely be married with kids. That’s what a generation of political government incompetence looks like.
This month, the NDP government terminated its contract with Cross Fraser Partnership, the consortium it hired in 2024 to design and build a replacement tunnel under the Fraser River. It says it could not agree on commercial terms, so it’s going back to market, breaking the project into smaller pieces and pushing major construction past 2027. Translation: more delay, more cost, more excuses, no relief for drivers.
Remember how we got here. In 2017, the newly elected NDP cancelled a bridge where early work was already underway. That bridge would have opened in 2024 at a cost of $3 billion. Instead, the NDP chose a costlier, environmentally challenging tunnel with a 2021 budget at $4.15 billion. Today, industry experts suggest the real figure is at least $9 billion, and likely more. By the time the overruns are tallied, taxpayers face a bill quadruple the original bridge plan.
Four times the price. Years behind schedule. Still no shovels in the ground.
This is not bad luck; it’s a pattern. The cost of Site C doubled on this government's watch, from $8 billion to $16 billion. The Pattullo Bridge replacement, the Broadway subway line, the Langley SkyTrain, the Cowichan hospital – it seems that every large public sector project overseen by this government has, or will, come in over budget and behind schedule, by years and sometimes by multiple billions.
When CKNW Radio asked whether the cheaper bridge could be revived, the Minister’s answer was telling: “No, that’s done. It’s what Metro Vancouver [mayors’ council] wants.” That is precisely the group no one should be listening to. These are the same people who turned the $700-million North Shore wastewater plant into a $4 billion boondoggle that will saddle homeowners with a massive property tax surcharge for 30 years. Holding up the Lower Mainland’s mayors as competent infrastructure builders and voices of fiscal responsibility is not leadership: it is more like the blind leading the blind.
The minister could not even bring himself to tell taxpayers the plain truth: this tunnel is on track to become the most expensive piece of transportation infrastructure ever built in this province.
Here is what makes the whole saga so maddening. British Columbia knows how to build bridges – three over this same river. Golden Ears in 2009, the new Port Mann in 2012, and the new Pattullo this year. Put aside the debates about size and capacity of each, we have done this before, repeatedly, faster and cheaper than what is now unfolding at the site of one of Canada’s worst traffic bottlenecks.
So why cancel a bridge that was funded, designed and ready to build, only to chase a costlier, riskier tunnel? There is no good answer. There is only politics. This is political malfeasance of the highest order, and Lower Mainland commuters and businesses will be paying for it every day.
We all pay for cost overruns and epic government mismanagement. We pay in lost time, idling in lineups morning and night. And we all pay in lost opportunity, as our supply chain strains under chronic underinvestment.
It has taken a generation to get nowhere. The NDP government has been in power for nine years and yet seems callously oblivious to the traffic nightmare unfolding every day at the Massey Tunnel. And, if anyone needs a reminder of how far off-track things really are, construction on the current tunnel started in March 1957, and it opened in May 1959. But that happened with a government focused on building B.C. and moving fast.
How this sorry story ends for commuters and taxpayers is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: the Massey Tunnel replacement is not coming any time soon.