{"id":36499,"date":"2016-12-02T03:00:59","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36499"},"modified":"2016-12-01T11:07:25","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T16:07:25","slug":"the-ontario-government-it-doesnt-exactly-take-moriarty-to-get-one-over-on-this-gang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/02\/the-ontario-government-it-doesnt-exactly-take-moriarty-to-get-one-over-on-this-gang\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ontario government – “It doesn\u2019t exactly take Moriarty to get one over on this gang”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has a few mild criticisms of how Kathleen Wynn’s government spends public money on infrastructure<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Over the next decade, the Ontario government plans to spend $17 billion rehabilitating existing infrastructure, mostly on roads and bridges, and $31 billion on new infrastructure, mostly on public transit \u2014 much of the latter in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. For some weary commuters, the promise of relief might be one of the few remaining attractions Premier Kathleen Wynne\u2019s phenomenally unpopular administration has to offer \u2014 assuming, of course, they have some degree of confidence their money will be spent properly.<\/p>\n

Page 496 of Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk\u2019s latest report, released Wednesday, has something to say about that.<\/p>\n

The scene: the Pickering GO station. Metrolinx was to build a pedestrian bridge across Highway 401. Not a herculean feat, one might have thought. Alas the winning bidder \u201chad no experience in installing bridge trusses\u201d \u2014 which is \u201csomething that a contractor constructing a bridge would be expected to know how to do,\u201d Lysyk\u2019s report dryly notes.<\/p>\n

After the contractor \u201cinstalled one truss upside down\u201d \u2014 no, seriously \u2014 Metrolinx essentially took over the project. But it paid the contractor the full $19-million for the first phase of the project anyway. Then it gave the same contractors the contract for phase two \u2014 hey, it had the low bid! \u2014 and lo and behold they pooped the bed again, damaging glass to the tune of $1 million and building a stairway too wide to accommodate the planned cladding.<\/p>\n

At this point, according to the Auditor-General, Metrolinx terminated the contract. It paid 99 per cent of the bill anyway. And later \u2014 no, seriously! \u2014 it gave the company another $39 million contract. \u201cMetrolinx lacks a process to prevent poorly performing contractors from bidding on future contracts,\u201d the report observes. Transport Minister Steven Del Duca said a new \u201cvendor performance management system\u201d would do just that, but one wonders why something so fancy-sounding was necessary to perform such a basic function. (Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins disputes the decision-making timeline in the report; according to hers, the contractor\u2019s ineptitude was unknown when further work was awarded.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ontario’s Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has a few mild criticisms of how Kathleen Wynn’s government spends public money on infrastructure: Over the next decade, the Ontario government plans to spend $17 billion rehabilitating existing infrastructure, mostly on roads and bridges, and $31 billion on new infrastructure, mostly on public transit \u2014 much of the latter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,84],"tags":[711,957,87],"class_list":["post-36499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-government","tag-infrastructure","tag-kathleenwynne","tag-ontario"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9uH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36500,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36499\/revisions\/36500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}