Budgets for projects such as the Eglinton Crosstown LRT tend to balloon, and most people don't understand why.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
In 2017, Adi Astl, a 73-year-old retired mechanic, asked the City of Toronto about installing stairs at the entrance to a park near his west-end home. Getting to the park’s community garden involved descending a short but steep embankment, where people would regularly slip and fall. At least one person had broken a wrist.
But the city said that stairs were unaffordable, and beyond its budget. It estimated that building them would cost $65,000 to $150,000.
So, Mr. Astl decided to build, baby, build them himself.
He spent $550 on supplies and hired a homeless man to help. Fourteen hours later: Stairs.
Mr. Astl’s wooden steps were a major improvement, but they were also not to code, so municipal workers swooped in, ripped them out, and installed a concrete replacement. The city said the price tag was $10,000, though the Toronto Sun later discovered that gold plating Mr. Astl’s day’s work had involved five city employees and 82.5 hours of overtime.
Most of us can’t really get our heads around the cost of a megaproject. If a hydro dam budgeted at, say, $7.4-billion ends up devouring $13-billion – I’m looking at you, Muskrat Falls – what does that even mean? If the Ontario Line, being built by the province in Toronto, balloons to $19-billion, who’s to say that’s unreasonable? You don’t have personal experience with excavating a subway, or writing cheques with 10 figures, and neither do I.
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But when Bev Oda expensed a $16 glass of orange juice, it provoked outrage. The former federal minister of international co-operation was found to have been overly enthusiastic with her expense account, but it was the smallest of offences that sparked the biggest outrage. It was the most relatable. You know the price of orange juice.
It’s the same story with a senior citizen with a tool box solving a problem, in one day, at a cost 1,000 times less than the government estimate. We can all see that something’s not right.
In their new book, Abundance, American journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue – and it’s hard to disagree – that progressive politicians have built a regulatory state that tends to make it impossible to build anything. Paralysis wasn’t the plan, but it became the destination. American cities and states run by the Democratic Party, where most Americans want to live, are also where it’s the most expensive and difficult (or impossible) to build anything, from transit to housing. There’s a lot of that in Canada, too.
The authors argue that, rather than an agenda that celebrates the regulation of stagnation, what’s needed on the centre-left is an agenda of abundance – of getting things done, getting things built and making government work.
The alternative to fixing a broken government and regulatory state is DOGE. The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency starts from the proposition that a broken government would be a wonderful thing, and it’s working hard to achieve that.
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The Elon Musk-led initiative smashed many big things. A small and relatable example arrived earlier this week, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that, after a proper DOGEing, the deep and detailed survey that has long formed the basis for monthly U.S. inflation figures is now a lot less deep, detailed – and accurate.
DOGE is not about fixing government. It’s about breaking it. It’s nihilism.
What’s needed is to make government work, including making regulation of the private sector as robust as necessary and as light as possible. Yes, it’s difficult to find that balance. Yes, it’s harder than claiming that government’s existence is the problem, or asserting the opposite, that the excesses of existing regulations and bureaucracy can only be remedied by more regulations and more bureaucracy. In the real world we need to make hard choices and trade-offs, which is what governing is supposed to be all about.
The mayor of Longueuil, Quebec’s fifth-largest municipality, enumerated the high cost of building things in her city in a TikTok post last month. Catherine Fournier wanted to shock, and she did.
There was one megaproject on her list, a waste-water treatment plant whose cost has nearly quadrupled, to $1.3-billion. But it was the little things that stood out.
She said a set of traffic lights had cost $1-million. Fixing 300 metres of street: $3.5-million. Rebuilding two, 50-metre-long wooden walkways in a park: $1.2-million. Renovating a baseball diamond: $1-million. Repairing a small outdoor pool: $16-million. Refreshing a children’s play area: $850,000.
The most arresting expense was, of course, the smallest. One speed bump: $10,000.