Picture a new bridge linking Ottawa and Gatineau, Que.
The federal government promises the $310-million span will pay for itself within five years because there will be less congestion and lower maintenance costs. Unfortunately, nearly two years after it opens, the bridge is still only partly built. More than half the vehicles using the unfinished span tumble into the Ottawa River.
So now the government is giving the original contractor more money, rehiring laid-off maintenance workers and adding hundreds of new employees to finish the project. The expected savings are gone as the cost swells to $1-billion.
There is no such bridge, but the figures are very real. They reflect another hopelessly botched federal project – the troubled Phoenix pay system that doles out $22-billion a year to most of the 290,000 federal workers.
Phoenix is a catastrophic system failure of government, created by the Conservatives and perpetuated by the Liberals.
Paying its workers is among the most basic responsibilities citizens ask of any employer, and Ottawa has failed miserably. In a report released this week, Auditor-General Michael Ferguson says the government didn't just bungle the pay system rollout in 2016. In the months since, the government has repeatedly misdiagnosed the problem and underestimated what it must do to fix it.
More than half the paycheques spat out by Phoenix are still either too high or too low, according to the Auditor-General. Last year, 62 per cent of federal workers were paid incorrectly at least once. The government is now swamped with nearly half a million unresolved pay claims, totalling $520-million, and the backlog is still growing.
One of the most chilling parts of Mr. Ferguson's report is his warning that Canada may be facing the same challenges that Australia's Queensland state has in overhauling its health-care pay system. The much smaller project, launched in 2006, has already ballooned to $1.2-billion, and problems remain. As with Phoenix, the Queensland system was designed by IBM. And as with here, it was rushed into service before it was ready. An Australian government commission called it one of the country's worst "failures in public administration."
The Phoenix disaster is partly an issue of technology. The system incorporated 200 custom computer programs to handle 80,000 different pay rules across dozens of departments and agencies. But at its core, it is a failure by politicians and bureaucrats to plan, manage and execute an essential government function. And then, when things went badly wrong, those in charge repeatedly balked at owning up to their mistakes and fixing them.
The lure of Phoenix was the projected savings. The idea was to create an easy-to-manage system, operated by a much smaller centralized staff, based in Miramichi, N.B., instead of Ottawa. About 460 newly hired pay advisers would do the work of 1,200 experienced ones. Instead, the government now employs more pay advisers than ever.
Bureaucrats at Public Services and Procurement Canada, the department responsible for Phoenix, badly oversold the expected savings to the former Conservative government. They promised the system would cut costs by nearly $700-million over eight years, according to internal documents obtained recently by Radio-Canada. Then they compounded the problem by rushing the complex system into service with a shrunken staff of inexperienced workers.
The Liberals came to power just as Phoenix was poised to be rolled out. As pay mistakes began to pile up, they and top bureaucrats promised quick fixes, while playing down the seriousness of the underlying problem.
This week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pointed an accusatory finger at the Conservatives. "The Liberal government did not create this mess, but we are going to fix this mess," he said.
That's a cop-out. There is plenty of blame to go around, and the Liberals should own up to their share. The Conservatives, including former Public Works ministers Rona Ambrose and Christian Paradis, were duped by a flawed plan. Many people, including top bureaucrats and IBM, oversold the savings and ignored the many risks and pitfalls. Then the Liberals flipped the switch on – the equivalent of cutting the ribbon on a new bridge before installing guardrails and an off-ramp.
The government's failure to get such a fundamental thing even half-right right raises serious questions about its ability to plan and implement other large projects.