Authors: Terry Fallis
A new government’s first caucus meeting was usually covered by the Parliamentary Press Gallery. But in view of the bridge situation and Angus’s already sky-high popularity, Bradley Stanton had pulled the plug on the traditional day-one photo op, for fear we might again upstage the Prime Minister. Good call. At Angus’s first caucus meeting after the previous fall’s election, the reporters and cameras had filed into the room behind the Leader according to plan, to the frenzied applause of the Liberal MPs (all except for Angus, of course, who’d sat on his hands). Ten seconds later, all six cameras had swung from the Leader to focus on Angus, who’d just upset the popular Finance Minister in C-P. He’d obviously upset Bradley Stanton too. He was not amused
and stared me down at the back of the room. If looks could kill, Bradley would still be fighting a murder rap.
Now, some three months later, Angus and I stood together in the foyer and watched the scene for a few moments. MPs arrived in clumps to a ritual display of handshakes, shoulder squeezes, and of course backslapping.
“Clearly, one’s back plays an important role in politics,” Angus said in a voice that I wish hadn’t been quite so loud. “I daresay, if you took backslappin’, back-scratchin’, and backstabbin’ away from politics as it’s practised in this land, there’d not be much left over.”
Angus left me standing at my post at the back of the room with a few other advisers and plunked himself down in the middle of the gathering pack of MPs. Soon after, the Liberal Leader, our new Prime Minister, strode into the room. He affected confidence, power, and leadership, while Angus affected boredom, impatience, and disdain. The room erupted on cue. Angus at least clapped this time but still had trouble with the standing half of the ovation equation.
The Prime Minister stood at the front facing the caucus adulation. His hands said “Okay that’s enough, let’s get down to business,” but his face said “I can’t hear you …” Eventually, the room settled.
“Friends, welcome to the better side of the House. Welcome to a new Liberal government. Welcome to a new era for Canada,” intoned the Prime Minister.
Again with the standing O. Angus rolled his eyes in such a way as to make it clear that he didn’t care whether his colleagues had seen him roll his eyes. He really had no tolerance for the orgy of self-congratulations that always, always followed election victories, regardless of political stripe.
The Prime Minister spoke well, without notes, for fifteen minutes or so, offering his analysis of the campaign and the victory. He paid tribute to his campaign team in general, and Bradley Stanton in particular, and congratulated the new and returning
MPs on winning their seats. He then lamented the defeat of several sitting Liberals MPs but didn’t dwell on the negative. At one point, the PM actually declared “We have made it across the Rubicon to the promised land.”
Angus winced, then turned in his seat to find me so we could both take offence at the fractured metaphor. Why not “We have buttered our bread and must now lie in it,” I thought to myself.
Towards the end of his pep rally speech, the PM reached the part we’d all been awaiting.
“Friends, the collapse of the Alexandra Bridge has shaken us all. It marks the collapse of a Tory regime, but it also leaves us to pick up the pieces. We are fortunate to have returning to caucus Angus McLintock. He took down the Honourable Eric Cameron last time around, and then a week ago humbled Flamethrower Fox. But Angus is also an accomplished engineering professor. I have unleashed Angus McLintock to get to the bottom of the Alexandra Bridge collapse. He will find out just what happened early in the morning last Tuesday irregardless of the costs and consequences. Angus, may I impose on you to share a few words and bring us up to date?”
Bradley had warned us about this and Angus was ready. I knew he’d be appalled to hear the word “irregardless” fall from the new PM’s mouth, but Angus held his tongue, stood, and made his way to the front as the room once again detonated into wild cheering and applause. Angus faced the raucous crowd. His hands said “Okay that’s enough, let’s get down to business,” but his face said “Shut your bleedin’ cake-holes, time’s a wastin’!” Thankfully, his mouth remained closed. The room settled abruptly.
“Thank you, Prime Minister, and congratulations on the new title,” Angus opened. “The Prime Minister has asked us to look into the bridge failure and to report to him by the 26th of this month
irrespective
of the costs and consequences. Our mandate is not just to discover what exactly happened last Tuesday morning, but more importantly to determine why. We’re also to provide recommendations to ensure that such a calamity does not
befall us again. Our investigation proceeds apace. It would be premature to speak of our findings to date. We have ruled out many theories, but one working hypothesis remains intact. I’ll not discuss it now, but if it still holds when our analysis is complete, history may well consider the fall of the Alexandra Bridge not to be an isolated aberration, but rather a canary in Canada’s coal mine. I thank you.”
With that, Angus returned to his seat.
“But you’re just focused on the bridge, right?” asked Bradley Stanton from his seat next to the Prime Minister.
“Of course we’re focused on the bridge. Determining the cause of the collapse and preventing future failures would hardly be possible otherwise,” replied Angus with an impatient edge to his voice. “That’s what we’ve been asked to do, but we’ll not paper over deeper implications should we find them in play. We’re to be thorough and transparent, and that we intend to be.”
“We understand all that, Angus,” cut in the PM. “But we’re not looking for a Royal Commission here, just an explanation for why the bridge fell.”
“Fear not, Prime Minister, you’ll soon have your explanation.”
The PM and Stanton didn’t look as if they’d completely bought into the “fear not” part.
That afternoon, Angus and I attended our much-anticipated meeting with the Deputy Minister for Infrastructure Canada, the department responsible for maintaining the Alexandra Bridge. It had taken some time to arrange the meeting because the outgoing government seemed to be stalling. It was only after our new Prime Minister was officially sworn in that the log jam was broken. After the ceremony at Rideau Hall, one call from Bradley Stanton on the PM’s behalf gave us the access to the senior departmental officials that we needed.
Infrastructure Canada was housed in the Place du Portage complex of office buildings, ironically just a short distance from the fallen bridge. Angus and I were ushered in to the Deputy
Minister’s office at 1:00 p.m. Rosemary Holden was a respected career bureaucrat, known for her intellect and integrity, who’d been DM at IC for nearly eight years. We shook hands. Despite a lumberjack’s grip, she wore no plaid, but went with the standard-issue dark blue suit complemented by quite funky glasses. She’d come around her desk to greet us and seat us at a round table by the window.
“Mr. McLintock, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and you as well, Mr. Addison.”
“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms Holden, or should I call you Deputy?” Angus wondered aloud. “For the life of me, I can’t get used to the honorifics attached to everything, so I insist you just call me Angus.”
“Rosemary will do nicely for me,” she replied. “I regret that it’s taken us a while to convene this important first meeting. The delay was beyond my control.”
“Aye, the long arm of partisan politics again, I hear. I think an amputation is in order,” Angus suggested. “But no matter, we’ve been busy in the interim.”
“You surely have. I have watched your work on the bridge from my desk, when I’ve lifted my head from the preparations for this meeting,” she noted, and pointed out the window to the bridge a few hundred metres away.
Angus seemed quite at ease so I just kept my yap shut.
“Rosemary, let me place a theory before you and get your reaction,” Angus proposed. “We’ve not the proof yet, but logic and mounting circumstantial evidence have us very much leaning this way.”
Angus spoke as if I was totally in the loop and I reinforced this by nodding sagely. In reality, I had no idea what his theory was.
“Lead on, Mr. McLintock.”
“Please, Angus, if you will. Only magistrates have called me Mr. McLintock before setting bail, and that was many years ago.”
She smiled and nodded.
“I’ll try, Angus. I actually live in your riding and so have heard
all about your past brushes with the law. Let’s just say I wasn’t nearly as concerned about them as your opponents seemed to be.”
It was Angus’s turn to smile and nod. Then back to business.
“Based on what we’ve learned from close examination of the wreckage, and a quick review of the public accounts, in particular Infrastructure Canada’s expenditures over the last ten years or so, we posit that the Alexandra Bridge would be safe and secure today had its rigorous maintenance schedule been assiduously followed.”
“You are absolutely correct, sir. Wherever the nail is, you’ve just hit it squarely on the head.”
“And I suspect that over the past decade or so, regular maintenance of federal roads, bridges, ports, and whatever else we manage has been sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction, making the Alexandra Bridge just the first significant failure of a sadly neglected national infrastructure,” Angus continued.
I now understood the coal mine canary reference Angus had made at caucus.
“Not quite, sir,” she answered. “The steady reduction in infrastructure spending actually began twenty years ago, but you’ve got the rest of the story right.”
I did the math on instinct.
“So this legacy of underfunding can be traced back to the last Liberal government, not just to the Tories,” I calculated. “How inconvenient.”
“What does it matter? This is not a partisan exercise. Are we not looking for the truth of all of this?” asked Angus.
I exchanged knowing looks with Rosemary Holden.
“Angus, I regret to say that the centre will very much want to make this a partisan exercise, regardless of our lofty ideals,” I warned. “And Bradley Stanton will not be pleased to learn that it actually started on our watch, twenty years ago.”
“Aye, ’Tis surely the case. But we’ll be telling the complete story before the spinning can start. Therein lies our only hope.”
“So tell me more about this theory of yours,” the DM asked.
“Well, ’Tis nothing too advanced,” started Angus. “It seems to me that we haven’t at all eliminated our annual budget deficit, despite the nation’s black balance sheet. Rather, all we have succeeded in doing is to transform our deficit from a monetary shortfall into a crumbling infrastructure. We may not strictly have a financial deficit, but it’s increasingly clear that we have a roads deficit, a bridges deficit, an all-encompassing infrastructure deficit, that will cost us dearly in the coming years. In fact, I reckon it will cost the national purse much more than it would have had we simply followed the maintenance schedules as they’d been laid out.”
Rosemary nodded.
“Dinnae misunderstand me,” he continued. “I do not abide spending money we don’t have. But saving a few billion dollars in one year by delaying investment in infrastructure maintenance is illusory. It will surely cost us much more dearly years later to rebuild those roads and bridges that are near ruined through neglect.”
“Yes sir, the economics are inescapable. Short-term gain for long-term pain,” she agreed. “Eight years ago when I started here, I was arguing for higher infrastructure spending. In the last three years, I’ve been warning of the kind of disaster we had last week,” she noted, pointing to the bridge. “I very nearly resigned last year over it but ultimately decided I’d stick it out for one more election and see what might transpire.”
We talked for an hour and a half, learning more than we’d ever expected to know about the state of our nation’s infrastructure. She’d prepared detailed packages chronicling the whole sorry story, including several plaintive confidential memos to a decade of different ministers warning of the costs of infrastructure decay. Rosemary’s staff had already developed a detailed briefing note on the Alexandra Bridge, including the maintenance schedule. Before the spending cuts began under the Liberals two decades ago, minor inspections of the bridge took place on a monthly basis. Major inspections were undertaken
every six months, and comprehensive maintenance work was done on a quarterly schedule whether it showed signs of needing it or not. When the deficit became a national obsession, corners were cut. Well, more like entire blocks were cut. Now, twenty years on, minor inspections were done quarterly, major inspections every two years, and comprehensive maintenance yearly and only when prompted by visible evidence. This decline in infrastructure spending precisely paralleled the government’s very successful deficit-reduction program.
“So our hypothesis is essentially correct,” Angus commented. “The deficit was eliminated on the back of a sadly neglected and decaying infrastructure.”
“Absolutely and undeniably,” she confirmed.
“I thank you for these documents. We’ll examine them closely,” Angus said. “May I ask you one final question before we take our leave?”
“Of course.”
“Who was the Deputy Minister here when all of this started two decades ago?”
“A civil service legend, Harold Silverberg,” Rosemary reported. “He’s long since retired but still lives in Ottawa.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon comparing the increasingly lax maintenance programs with the steady decline in Infrastructure Canada expenditures across one Liberal and four Tory governments. No fewer than nine different finance ministers had wielded the knife. They may have aimed to trim fat but had cut much deeper, eventually right through to the steel of the Alexandra Bridge. It made for a troubling tale that should have been written years earlier. It had been hiding in plain sight until the day the bridge came tumbling down.
Lindsay, Angus, and I watched the eleven o’clock news that night in his living room. A crescent moon hung high in the sky. As expected, the lead story was the unveiling of the new Cabinet. The PM looked good in the clip. There were no shocks in the
lineup, but there were a couple of minor surprises. The Prime Minister had decided to keep Infrastructure Canada for himself, signalling that the Alexandra Bridge file was important to him. I thought that was good news for us. But the bad news wasn’t far behind.