TOO FAR?

Like so many places, until recently there were trolleys and trains zooming people all over Victoria and beyond. From 1888 to 1923, a foot and rail bridge crossed the waterway at Johnson Street, connecting downtown with Esquimalt. In 1924, that bridge was replaced by another that, for some reason, also accommodated automobiles. In 1979, after extensive repairs on the severely corroded bridge, the Johnson Street Bridge was painted light blue and became universally known as “The Blue Bridge.”

When I first moved to Victoria there was still a train you could take from downtown, across the bridge and through Esquimalt to where everyone now lives in Langford, and up-island to Duncan and Nanaimo, as well as points north and west. Both the train and the bridge were iconic. Both are gone. *Tear* The old bridge, who survived 85 years, was replaced with a fancy new one — a much more streamlined single-leaf bascule bridge.

Though the city wanted to refurbish the blue beauty to give her another 40 years of life at a cost of $30 million, they were convinced to go with a brand new bridge at a cost of just $10 million more. When it came time to build, the price tag jumped to $63 million then soon nearly $80 million and before long it was around $90 million. When the project was completed in 2018, two-years late, it was $65 million over budget. If you’ve lived in the world, all of that looks pretty typical. But I bring it up because: this masterful bridge replacement boondoggle earned the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s “Most Wasteful Project of the Year” award; then in 2020 there was supposed to be an audit to explain to the public where all their money went but, you see, there was a pandemic so, you know, obviously accountants couldn’t look at spreadsheets; and then as the pandemic was winding down the province just decided to kill off the office of the Auditor General for Local Government who was supposed to do the investigating (because oversight was deemed to be “unpopular”), which, apparently, just made the whole matter disappear…

Oh and I also spell all this out here because if you go to the Wikipedia page for “Johnson Street Bridge” you’ll find none of the above. What you will find is a note offering a perfectly fictional pricing for the build, insisting “actual costs of $96.08 million had been incurred, to an approved budget of $105.06 million.”

As Mark Normand says: Comedy!