The third link does not stop giving rise to surreal and frankly embarrassing scenes for the CAQ.
Very good business to have abandoned this insane and financially irresponsible project of a third Quebec-Lévis highway link. But it is still necessary to seriously study the new tunnel project reserved solely for public transport.
In this regard, things are off to a very bad start.
The Legault government does not want to say the estimate of the cost of the project. He has one. It is written in black and white in one of the studies unveiled in April, but was redacted in the documents made public.
Prime Minister François Legault said last week that he did not know the cost of the new project. He would have read a summarized version of the report which did not contain this figure. However, François Legault, an accountant by training, is a man of numbers. This is why no one believes this implausible explanation.
Anyway, the Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, knows the figure. But she refused to make this information – however crucial – public “so as not to influence the possible tendering process”, according to her cabinet.1.
This explanation by Minister Guilbault is inconsistent. In Quebec, regardless of its color, the government has always announced the estimated cost of major projects. This is a basic principle of good governance.
In April 2022, when the Legault government announced its two-tube third link project (the project abandoned two weeks ago), it gave an update of the cost: 6.5 billion. (It was greatly underestimated. Minister Guilbault confirmed that the cost would have been 10 billion for two tubes instead.)
We cannot have a healthy and rigorous public debate on a major transportation project – possibly the most expensive in the history of Quebec besides the Montreal metro and the REM – if we don’t know how much it will cost!
We are not alone in rejecting Minister Guilbault’s call for tenders argument to justify the government’s silence. “It doesn’t make sense,” says Maude Brunet, professor of management at HEC Montréal and specialist in the management of public infrastructure projects. “We need to have an idea of all the costs and benefits,” says Ms.me Brunett.
We have our own idea why the Legault government is hiding the cost of the latest version of its third link: because the cost would make no sense for the expected traffic, which was unveiled by Quebec and which is all in all modest, with approximately 13,600 passages per day. 2
The third link is not the only file where the CAQ played hide and seek with costs last week.
The Legault government also questioned the Ministry of Health’s own figures on the cost of private surgeries… without giving the correct figures.
Thanks to an access to information request from the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) to the Ministry of Health, it was learned that surgical procedures have generally been more expensive in the private sector than in the as part of a pilot project held between 2018 and 2020 (counting only direct costs, because indirect costs cannot be compared).
The Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, replied that these figures were no longer good, that he had more recent ones (for private operations during the pandemic), but that he did not make them public between others because there will soon be calls for tenders for the private sector. This explanation does not hold water, especially since Quebec can give the average of private clinics.
On Friday, the office of Minister Dubé, who usually likes numbers and transparency, clarified the situation and assured us that the cost of private and public operations during the pandemic will be made public within a few weeks. On the transparency side, it’s the right thing to do.
Hiding project costs by giving a bogus excuse – like the CAQ does with the third link – is not good governance.
It doesn’t solve anything and it only thickens the fog.
2. The ridership figure disclosed by Quebec: 3,400 passages during morning rush hours. As the morning rush hour generally represents 25% of the day’s traffic, that would give 13,600 passages per day. This last figure is our estimate.