The Bluenose II at berth in Lunenburg, N.S.Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press
We don't know what you do for fun, but here at The Globe editorial board we get our kicks reading auditor-generals' reports. Rarely have we encountered one as bracing as the Auditor-General of Nova Scotia's saga of the Bluenose II restoration project. Michael Pickup's report may well deplete the world's supply of synonyms for "incompetent" by the end of this year.
To recap it all in under 5,000 words is impossible. Here are the basics: The Nova Scotia government decided in 2009 to rebuild the Bluenose II, a replica of the original legendary Grand Banks schooner pictured on the Canadian dime. The job, budgeted at $14.4-million, was given to the tourism department, which knows a lot about organizing fiddling contests but had few on staff familiar with the exigencies of a multimillion-dollar building project.
In due time, the department hired a project management company that had no experience in ship-building and a design firm that had little experience designing wooden boats.
The construction contract went to the only bidder, a consortium of three boat-building companies in Lunenburg. When the department tried to include penalties for lateness in the contract, the consortium said no, because that's what you can do when you are the sole bidder on a pet government project managed by people whose only previous brush with the Bluenose came when they pocketed the change on a $1.90 cup of coffee.
The Auditor-General uncovered that the budget was an estimate; no research into actual costs was done. There were no project goals and no one knew what they were doing or who was in charge.
The result was a leaky boat with poorly installed masts. In the most metaphorically apt display of ineptitude, the ship's wooden rudder was replaced with a heavy steel one. The builders subsequently discovered no human was strong enough to turn it. They have since added a hydraulic system so that the captain might one day be able to steer the Bluenose II away from the rocks.
In the end, the two-year project will finish three years late and cost more than $20-million. But it's not the money that stings as much as it is knowing that governments continue to manage projects so badly. Mr. Pickup noted that the Nova Scotia government made virtually all the same mistakes when it replaced a hospital in 2010. And we still see similar boondoggles at all levels of government across Canada.
We like reading auditor-generals' reports, but we'd like it better if governments read them, too.