David Broadland

Is Fisheries & Oceans Canada ignoring Washington State research on chemical contamination from sewage treatment plants? ARE THREE LARGE SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS located on the Fraser River estuary contributing to the decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population? Between them they discharge 1.1 billion litres of effluent every day of the year into the estuary and nearshore marine waters. The largest, Iona Island, provides only primary treatment and has been permitted by Fisheries and Oceans Canada to continue at that level until 2030. We now know that the reproductive health of the orca population depends heavily on the availability of Fraser River chinook salmon, but, according to fisheries scientists, chinook runs on the Fraser are now only 25 percent of historic numbers. Recent research in Washington has found a strong link between the survival rate of juvenile chinook salmon and chemical contamination of their natal estuary. Is the survival rate of Fraser River juvenile chinook being similarly impacted by contamination from the Annacis Island, Lulu Island and Iona Island wastewater treatment plants? Currently, these three plants provide treatment for over 1.8 million people, and that population is not declining. Vancouver’s three largest sewage treatment plants all discharge into critical chinook salmon habitat. The physical processes involved in this chinook-sewage-orca death spiral have become better understood in recent years thanks to research by Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, and Dr Samuel Wasser, a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington. Since 2013, Meador and his team of researchers have published three studies that considered the impact of chemical contamination on juvenile chinook salmon during the period they reside in their natal estuary. Meador’s first study found that the survival rate of juvenile chinook that smolted in contaminated estuaries of rivers flowing into Puget Sound was cut in half compared with juveniles coming from a relatively uncontaminated natal estuary. Let me repeat that: Survival rate is cut in half. In his second study, Meador analyzed the discharge from secondary sewage treatment plants, located upstream from chinook estuaries, for the occurrence of 150 “chemicals of emerging concern,” or CECs. These are chemicals associated with pharmaceutical and personal care products, as well as industrial compounds. Many are known endocrine disruptors, which can affect hormonal balance and result in developmental and reproductive abnormalities. The researchers also analyzed the tissue of juvenile chinook and resident sculpin in the estuary for the presence of the selected CECs. That study became widely publicized in 2016 because cocaine and antidepressants—and many other chemicals—were found in both the treatment plants’ discharge and in fish tissue. Indeed, Meador’s team found unexpectedly high levels of certain CECs in the treated effluent. The study’s findings suggested that chinook juveniles have a significant vulnerability to bioaccumulation of CECs. Many contaminants that were found in juvenile chinook tissue were at concentrations below detection limits in the estuary waters. The scientists also observed higher levels of contaminants in juvenile chinook than in resident sculpin, even though the latter were permanent residents of the estuary. Meador’s team observed that the contaminants found in chinook tissue, although present in sub-lethal concentrations on a chemical-by-chemical basis, were, in some cases, present at levels that would be expected to cause detrimental physiological effects. The scientists noted the potential for a drug-cocktail effect: “The fact that we observed multiple pharmaceuticals capable of interacting with a variety of molecular targets in our two fish species, leads to the potential for mixture interactions on critical physiological processes. These interactions can be additive, synergistic, or inhibitory.” Meador noted that these effects could be responsible for the two-fold reduction in survival rate found in his earlier study. In a third study (click link below to download), released this past April, Meador’s team found that the contaminants were also causing metabolic dysfunction, which “may result in early mortality or an impaired ability to compete for limited resources.” Again, Meador noted that metabolic dysfunction induced by CEC contamination could contribute to the two-fold reduction in the survival rate of these juvenile chinook, compared with chinook migrating from the uncontaminated estuaries, that he had found in his first study. Adverse metabolic effects in fish exposed to contaminants of emerging concern in the field and laboratory.pdf The US EPA has listed Puget Sound chinook as a “threatened” species, and the decline of those runs has been even more profound than the Fraser decline. Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, Puget Sound’s chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But by 2010, Puget Sound chinook returns had collapsed to only six percent of the size of the greatly-reduced Fraser River returns. Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population has been known for some time, Wasser’s seven-year-long study, published in 2017, provided the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive female orca. Wasser’s team collected orca poop and analyzed it for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats. Wasser’s team correlated periods of nutritional stress with the timing and strength of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orca alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. They found that—depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them—the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs. The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” The scientists surmised that “release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.” Not only are the orca being periodically starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the lack of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life. As a consequence of these conditions, the study noted, “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the Southern Resident Killer Whale population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.” As of this writing, with the presumed death of “Crewser,” the population has dwindled to 75 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods. Wasser noted, “Results of the Southern Resident Killer Whale study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.” Let’s make the obvious connection between Meador’s and Wasser’s findings. Meador’s research strongly suggests that the chemical contamination in Puget Sound rivers that’s quickly bioaccumulating in juvenile chinook is coming from sewage treatment plants discharging into their natal estuary. Removing that contamination could double the number of chinook returning to those rivers as adults. Wasser’s study shows the Southern Resident Killer Whale population’s decline is strongly correlated with the availability of chinook and he recommends, for one thing, that managers of the Fraser River fishery make chinook recovery amongst their highest priorities. A rational conclusion, based on the two groups of scientists’ extensive research, would be that Fraser River fisheries managers should be determining whether the impacts Meador measured in Washington estuaries are at play in the Fraser estuary. But that’s not happening. DFO recently published “A science based review of recovery actions for three at-risk whale populations” that listed 98 specific actions. DFO acknowledges that only 2 of the 98 measures are “specifically directed toward recovery of chinook salmon stocks in Canada.” None of those 98 actions include examination, let alone reduction, of the impacts of chemical contaminants on chinook juveniles in the Fraser River estuary. DFO paper on SRKW recovery efforts.pdf DFO has been caught flat-footed on chemical contamination of the Fraser River estuary in the past. The Cohen Commission of Inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River produced a technical report in 2011 that stated: “There is a strong possibility that exposure to contaminants of concern, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and/or contaminants of emerging concern has contributed to the decline of sockeye salmon abundance in the Fraser River.” Despite that, the technical report noted, “Due to limitations on the availability of exposure data and/or toxicity thresholds” it could provide only a “qualitative evaluation.” Cohen Comm report on chemical contaminants re sockeye decline.pdf That was in 2011 and the information gap was related to sockeye. With chinook runs on the verge of collapse, you would think that Meador’s published research on chinook estuary contamination, only 200 kilometres away, would have prompted DFO to narrow the gap in their knowledge. We contacted DFO, but as of our press deadline a spokesperson had been unable to confirm whether or not any DFO-affiliated scientist was investigating the impact of the Fraser River estuary wastewater treatment plants, or other sources of chemical contaminants, on the survival rate of juvenile chinook. The presumption may be that because sewage effluent is being discharged into the Fraser River estuary through outfalls that achieve legally required dilution ratios, no further consideration is required. But the rivers Meador considered in Puget Sound are meeting similar if not higher requirements, and he found chinook survival rate is being cut in half. Meador has said it’s unlikely these contaminants can be effectively filtered out of the huge volume of wastewater that’s being flushed into Puget Sound. In the case of the Fraser River it seems possible that the three plants could be connected to a super outfall that diverts the discharge away from the estuary and into deeper marine waters. But without any examination of chemical loading of Fraser chinook juveniles being conducted by DFO, there will be no public pressure mounted for such a measure. Mr Floatie ought to find a new costume (Cocaine Man?) and relocate to Vancouver. Victoria’s deepwater marine outfalls, by the way, are located about 70 kilometres away from the nearest chinook estuary. While DFO wasn’t certain about what research is being done, it’s more certain about the magnitude of the chinook decline. In its 2018 outlook for the six different populations of chinook in the Fraser Basin, fisheries managers found that only one was at a level considered necessary to maintain a healthy population. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. Related stories: The orca famine and Puget Sound's poisoned rivers Washington's phony sewage war with Victoria

We should call the new bridge what it is. VICTORIA'S NEW BRIDGE—variously dubbed “The Blew Budget Bridge,” “Fortin’s Folly,” and “The White Elephant”—opened on March 31, 2018. Notably absent from the group of officials presiding over the occasion were any of the former high-level City officials who lost their jobs as a consequence of the project’s long history of miscalculation and misrepresentation. The bridge’s original designer, Sebastien Ricard of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, who ended his connection with the project back in 2012, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Joost Meyboom, the private engineer who first advised the City to fix the old bridge rather than build a new one, back in 2008, but then went on to become the City’s prime consultant on the new bridge project. Meyboom’s employer—formerly MMM Group, which changed its name to WSP—launched a legal suit against the City over the project earlier this year. Opening of Victoria's new bridge No wonder all these folks skipped Mayor Lisa Helps’ $42,000 opening-day celebration. Back in April 2009, when City council voted to replace the existing “historically-significant” double-bascule bridge, those officials assured Victorians a new bridge would cost $41 million and take 18 months to build. Nine years later, costs have almost tripled while major elements of the project remain unestimated, unfunded and unfinished. Millions in costs directly attributable to the project have been hidden. The project’s record of underestimation and miscalculation, though, may be just a prelude to greater embarrassment to come. Certain aspects of the new bridge’s design and construction are so at odds with engineers’ warnings that, although the new bridge can, at this moment, open for marine traffic just like the old bridge, it’s highly doubtful whether it will come anywhere near to matching the old bridge’s 95-year record of reliable operation and minimal ongoing expense. While “The Blew Budget Bridge” does capture the huge miscalculation in cost, and “Fortin’s Folly” makes it clear that good people made bad decisions, only “The White Elephant”—which signifies over-the-top original cost and unjustifiable ongoing expense—provides a fulsome enough characterization of the so-far nameless new bridge. But even that needs updating. Here’s why I am leaning toward “The Wounded White Elephant.” The new bridge 's opening span provides the same navigational channel width as the old bridge did, but at huge costs and with hundreds of "nonconformities" welded into its superstructure. The most eye-catching feature of the new bridge is its 50-foot-diameter steel rings. The counterweight lobes attached to the rings do happen to resemble an elephant’s ears, but that’s not the reason why this bridge should be named “The White Elephant.” You won’t find anything like those rings—or the gigantic machinery below them needed to support and rotate them—on any bridge anywhere else on Earth. Unfortunately, designing a bridge that required 1700 tonnes of structural steel in its moveable superstructure and hundreds of tonnes of machinery to support that—just to span a 41-metre-wide opening—is not the direction planet Earth needs to go. (Worse, largely unacknowledged by the project is the fact that the first attempt to fabricate the superstructure was scrapped and as much as 1700 tonnes of steelwork wasted; more on this later.) Good, common-sense arguments were made against building Ricard’s design by engineers, and it’s because all the decision makers over the years ignored those arguments that the bridge cost three times what it should have and took 108 months to complete instead of 18. Because of those officials’ dismal performance, the bridge promises to be an ongoing source of expense to City of Victoria ratepayers and hence deserving of “The White Elephant” moniker. Below, I’ll highlight just a fraction of what happened. To start with, though, let’s recall why Ricard put those rings into his design. This is key to understanding why the project flubbed. Just before the November 2010 referendum in which the City won elector approval to build a new bridge, Ricard explained those rings at a public presentation. He told a handful of people that the underlying design challenge, for him, was to create a moveable bridge that easily communicated to an observer how it worked. That’s it. That’s the entire argument for the rings. The rings were all about appearance and not about any substantive proven need particular to a crossing of Victoria’s harbour. Ricard wasn’t trying to reduce seismic vulnerability or to create a bridge less likely to be hit by a barge full of gravel and survive the blow if one did. Nor was he trying to reduce life-cycle costs or use scarce public resources more efficiently. No, it was enough for Ricard that a tourist from Iowa, standing on the Laurel Point walkway, would be able to gaze across the Inner Harbour and understand how the bridge lifted, at a glance. Perhaps there’s a similar, whimsical rationale at the foundation of every white elephant construction project, and maybe Victorians are no better or worse than any other community at sniffing out ideas that don’t have much merit. I don’t know. But what I have learned, after following Victoria’s project closely for 9 long years, is that there were real-life consequences that flowed from the project’s ill-considered underpinnings. Ricard’s whimsical central motivation radiated outward through the project with force, inflating engineering and construction costs, laying waste to political and public service careers, substantially increasing carbon emissions, straining the City’s coffers, and dividing the community. Ricard’s imagination even put a well-established Chinese company out of business. How did all this happen? Let me sketch in some details. Let’s start with a fundamental physical fact about the bridge that resulted directly from Ricard’s rings. Because of a quirk in Ricard’s design, every time the bridge opens, it has to lift and hold the span a full 2.5 storeys higher than it needed to. Indeed, people have observed that, when it is lifted, the new bridge is “so much higher” than the old bridge. Yet the new bridge provides the same navigational channel width as the old bridge. That extra height might be dramatic to observe—like a hopping car—but it’s otherwise pointless and that little moment of drama has come with a lot of negative long-term consequences. The mechanical design of the new bridge results in it lifting the weight of the superstructure 2.5 storeys higher than necessary, an engineering feat almost as pointless as a hopping car. For example, every part of the bridge that moves had to be stronger than it would have needed to be in a bridge that used a fixed central axle with conventional bearings located as close to the edge of the channel as possible. That extra strength was obtained by using far more steel for the bridge—in the rings and trusses—than would have been necessary in a more conventional approach. Extra steel in the trusses meant more lead and steel were needed in the counterweights to balance that extra weight. All that extra weight in the superstructure meant the machinery that supports and rotates it needed to be immense compared to the shaft, bearings and machinery needed to rotate a more conventional moveable bridge. The higher lift of the span also meant that it would experience greater pressure during strong winds, and so that force, too, had to be offset with more steel and heavier support equipment, all costing more than a conventional approach. All of these additional weights and costs affected the approach bridges, too. It meant that for a given budget, less money could be spent on the approach bridges. Originally, to satisfy high seismic performance requirements, they were going to be built of steel. Instead, because of the inflating cost of the lifting span, there was only enough budget to use less costly reinforced concrete. But in order to include the use of concrete approach bridges, City officials had to secretly agree, during the procurement process, to place a rider in the construction contract that specified much lower levels of seismic performance than had been recommended to the City. The rider clearly states that its stipulations of (lower) performance take precedence over the seismic performance requirements of any of North America’s highway bridge building codes. This loss of one of the fundamental objectives of the project—a legally enforceable contractual assurance of a high level of seismic performance by the bridge if Victoria is struck by a large earthquake, can be traced directly to Ricard’s choice of rings in the lifting mechanism and the extent to which they inflated the cost of the project. City officials, the ones who later lost their jobs, were well-warned by engineers about the risk of Ricard’s open-ring design inflating costs. For example, during bidding for the contract to build the bridge, participating companies were required to provide a critical review of the design MMM had developed with Ricard, and they were invited to “optimize” that design so that it could be built within the City’s $66-million “affordability ceiling.” The winning bid by PCL was the only proposal that utilized Ricard’s open-ring concept. The only other serious bid proposal received by the City, from Kiewit Infrastructure, rejected the axleless design and predicted what would happen if the City went ahead with Ricard’s design. Specifically, Kiewit told City managers it had contacted “a number of steel and machinery fabricators, who are experienced in movable bridge design and/or construction. All expressed the opinion that there were likely more cost effective mechanical concepts for a bascule bridge” than the open-ring design used by Ricard and MMM. Kiewit advised the City that “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of Ricard’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling…Kiewit is of the view that the [design] may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” The company’s engineers noted that the counterweight in Ricard’s design was attached to the truss rings in a way that “would load the truss ring eccentrically, which could distort the ring—a highly undesirable condition.” The bridge proposed by PCL had the same eccentric loading of the rings that concerned Kiewit, but was going to have an added complication: In order for its bid to be within the City’s affordability ceiling, fabrication of the moveable part of the bridge would have to take place in China. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that the City listened to the wrong engineers, chose the wrong company to build a bridge, and built the wrong bridge. City officials were warned they were in danger of buying a White Elephant. Instead of heeding the warnings they insisted on having one as quickly as possible—and this meant hiding the critical reviews (which cost the City $150,000) from the public—and so Ricard’s whim rolled forward into the next phase. AS YOU MAY RECALL, the City of Victoria awarded a construction contract to PCL in late 2012 to build the bridge under a $63.2-million “fixed-price” contract. PCL made it clear it planned to have the moveable part of the bridge fabricated in China. This, apparently, raised no red flags at City Hall. At the time PCL won the construction contract, MMM Group were contracted to provide engineering, and it in turn subcontracted Hardesty & Hanover to provide engineering and design for the lifting span and the machinery used to raise that span. When PCL began construction in late 2013, the City of Victoria assured its ratepayers that the cost of the bridge could not rise since PCL had agreed to a “fixed-price” contract. But, by early 2014, PCL started to pepper the City with demands for more money. Those demands began soon after fabrication of the rings and trusses had started in China in March 2014. By September of that year, work in China had been halted. In January 2015, the City’s Project Director Jonathan Huggett reported that fabrication problems were so bad that “one of the rings is being replaced while the other is being repaired. The north truss steel will be replaced.” The first attempt to build Ricard's bridge at ZTSS's plant. Shown above are fabrication of the bridge's rings, trusses and deck components in July 2014. All of the steelwork done up to January 2015 was scrapped. Notably absent from Huggett’s reports from this era is any acknowledgment that the thing the Chinese welders were screwing up was actually very difficult to build. Neither did Huggett tell councillors that the City had been warned by Kiewit engineers that this was likely to happen if the City attempted to build Ricard’s design. Instead, Huggett persuaded the City that simply increasing quality control would produce rings and trusses with adequate strength and structural integrity. In spite of such hopes, fabrication problems in China continued to accumulate in the bridge components. Recently, Huggett admitted: “We rejected an entire bridge at one point.” The City’s project director seemed to see the scrapping of “an entire bridge” as a good thing, a sign that people were doing their jobs properly, that quality assurance procedures were working, and that Victorians could be confident that the project wouldn’t accept crap for a bridge. But think about that: An entire bridge wasted. If we take Huggett at his word, about 1700 metric tonnes of steel were scrapped. That’s the weight of structural steel for the superstructure specified in the City’s contract with PCL. (The City did not respond to repeated requests for confirmation of the amount of steel that was scrapped.) But we should add to that heavy burden all the human effort and other costs—including associated environmental damage—that went with throwing away the warm-up bridge. Who was going to pay for that waste? As it turned out, it wasn’t going to be PCL. The City had acknowledged PCL’s first demand for more money—$7.9 million in early 2014—but then demurred from providing information about subsequent demands. In early 2015, about the time “an entire bridge” was rejected, the City admitted it had entered a “legal mediation process” with the companies building the bridge. The second attempt to build Ricard's bridge, in March 2016 at ZTSS's plant near Shanghai. It wasn’t until April 2016, at the conclusion of the mediation, that the City acknowledged that PCL, MMM and H&H had demanded $27 million in additional costs. The details of that $27 million claim were never made public, but it is believed PCL’s share was about $25 million. After out-competing two other companies for the contract and assuring the City Ricard’s bridge could be built for $63 million, what circumstance could possibly have justified PCL’s demand for over 40 percent more money? The timing of the start of PCL’s demands, you may have noticed, coincided with the beginning of fabrication in China. As major components of the bridge were rejected, PCL’s claims against the City increased. The company may have realized that the lifting span being (badly) fabricated in China could carry a huge risk of future legal claims by the City. By demanding more money and halting work in China, PCL may have simply been creating the conditions for dumping all of that risk back on the City. And that’s exactly what happened. The City settled the $27 million in claims by agreeing to pay an additional $2.4 million and making changes to the terms of the contract. In a news report at the time, Mayor Helps claimed: “I think it’s better news than anyone could have hoped for.” But an FOI filed by johnsonstreetbridge.org revealed the City agreed to “release and forever discharge” PCL, MMM and H&H “from all debts, claims, demands, damages, expenses and costs (including without limitation, legal costs) of any nature or kind that are in any way related to the Project and either known or which ought to be known by the [City] as of [April 23, 2016].” This was hardly “better news than anyone could have hoped for.” Whatever problems have been built into the bridge by PCL, MMM and H&H are now City taxpayers’ problems. One of those problems was brought to the public’s attention in the last two editions of Focus (stories posted here, here, and here). And this is where the “wounded” part of “ Wounded White Elephant” comes into our story. MANY of the risks PCL adroitly shifted back onto the City arose directly from the bridge’s open-ring design. That such risks would have actual physical consequences became clear shortly after the rings were erected at the bridge site last December and Focus pointed out that the rings had already been repaired with metre-square bolted-on plates, apparently required because of a structural weakness in both rings. The bolted-on plates definitely eliminated any chance of the bridge winning any awards for excellence in engineering or construction. But much worse, they may signify a more pervasive problem with the lifting span. The City has refused to provide a full explanation for the plates, but we have since found a photograph taken during an open house at Point Hope Maritime’s shipyard last October that unintentionally captured details of the repair. The repair was made in Victoria after the rings had been shipped from China. The photograph (see the close-up below), taken before the bolted-on plates were added, reveals not only the make-shift nature of the repair but also at least two holes cut into the “fracture critical” steel with a cutting torch. That damage may have created the need for the plates, at least in part. This photograph shows the repair that was made to the north ring at Point Hope Maritime’s shipyard in October. The lines of small holes were drilled in China and would later allow the bolted-on plates to be attached. The trapezoidal-shaped opening cut into the ring was made at Point Hope. The holes circled with yellow are believed to be “rat holes” cut into the rings by an unknown welder in China. These rat holes may be part of the reason why bolted-on plates were added to both rings. The City’s Project Director Jonathan Huggett has acknowledged that the bridge has hundreds of such “non-conformances.” I emailed the photograph to Martin Bache, a 40-year veteran of the heavy steel fabrication industry in Canada, most recently with Canron as a project supervisor. About the burned-in holes that seem to have created the need for the bolted-on plates, Bache commented, “The cuts are similar to what are termed ‘rat holes’ in steel fabrication. These allow continuous welding of two members to take place through the member with the hole. But, I have never seen two rat holes coming together in two planes as these appear to be. A welder in China may have just taken a torch and cut out two large rat holes to make life easier for himself, but damaged the structural integrity in the process. But that would not seem to require such large bolted-on plates to correct, so I really don’t know what the real story is.” Around the time the photograph was taken at Point Hope Shipyard, someone had removed a trapezoidal-shaped section from the ring and had added some light steel supports for two edges of the bolted-on plates. Of the repair that was done in Victoria, Bache observed, “Not only this bizarre rat hole but also the other pieces of steel in the photo appear to be butchered to an astounding extent. No competent steel fabricator works this way. So, what the hell is going on here?” The steel members of the bridge that were cut into by both the Chinese welder and the workers at Point Hope are considered “fracture critical.” That designation, according to the US Federal Highway Administration, applies to “any steel member in tension, or with a tension element, whose failure would probably cause a portion of or the entire bridge to collapse.” Given the apparent low quality of the repair evident in the photograph, Bache is concerned the repair has not been executed properly. “Any modifications or repairs done to fracture critical bridge components must be performed to detailed procedures approved by the Engineer of Record (EOR) and must be inspected by the EOR or his agent to confirm 100 percent compliance with the procedures. It seems inconceivable that Hardesty & Hanover are accepting all of this butchery,” Bache wrote. Butchery. Wounded. Get it? Bache added, “With all due respect to shipyards, they are not generally expected to work to the same standards of quality and accuracy as bridge fabricators. I would have needed a lot of evidence to persuade me that a shipyard could handle modifications to a fracture critical bridge. Which party approved Point Hope as capable of doing this?” Bache had difficulty understanding who was/is looking out for the City’s interests: “Regarding third-party inspectors, they range from highly competent individuals with substantial levels of practical experience on fabrication shop floors, all the way down to people with absolutely no knowledge of steel and no ability to read drawings but are tasked only with receiving paper reports such as steel mill certificates and weld test reports prepared by others. In 40 years of fabrication I never heard of Atema, so I googled them. They appear to sell inspection equipment and offer to train others in how to run quality control programmes. They make no mention of having vast hands-on, shop-floor experience which would be necessary for confirming that complex fabrications are being made exactly to approved drawings and specifications. So, I don’t know how good a job Atema did in China but I have reason to be very suspicious. I know PCL very well and its hard to believe they would not have hired top level practical inspectors to go to China, but who knows? I wonder at what stage MMM ceased to be of real practical help to the City, including fabrication monitoring. After that its doubtful that [the City’s] interests were being handled by anybody.” Unfortunately, Focus can’t provide the answers to any of Bache’s concerns. The City has dismissed any such concerns about this repair, explaining only that it was the result of a “fabrication challenge.” This is just one of over 150 similar “non-conformities” recorded by the project, according to Huggett. The City’s idea of providing the public with information about the issue has been, in effect: “Why worry us about that one problem? The bridge contains hundreds of them.” The City continues to refuse to release records related to this one repair that were requested by Focus back in mid-December through BC’s access to information legislation. Until the City provides the basic communications about the issue between the City and the engineers who were responsible for resolving the issue, we will keep insisting on seeing those records. Martin Bache’s final comment was this: “What an absolute disaster that this bridge was not made in BC.” This raises an interesting point. PCL based its 2012 bid on a quote from a Chinese fabricator and that allowed it to sneak under the City’s affordability ceiling. That miracle required everyone involved to pretend that a 4 percent contingency would cover any errors in cost estimation and that Chinese labour really was “lower-cost.” If a few people had been smarter, Ricard’s rings would never have been built. Instead, Victoria got a disaster. Ironically, ZTSS did even worse. That company suffered significant financial losses during the time it was building Victoria’s bridge. (It was a publicly-traded company, so its financial performance is a matter of public record.) The cost of having to build the bridge twice, along with bad international publicity about “cracked welds,” no doubt harmed ZTSS’s ability to get new work. By November 2016, trading of the company’s shares had been halted. In August 2017, as Ricard’s wounded rings were finally arriving in Victoria and being readied for repairs at Point Hope, ZTSS announced it planned to sell the operation that had fabricated Victoria’s bridge. By January 2018 the company had undergone a corporate name change and was transformed into Beijing-Kaiwen Education Technology Co., Ltd. With a such a history, it’s unlikely that anyone would want their name on Victoria’s new bridge. What it deserves is a nickname that truthfully reflects its troubled 9-year-long birth. I respectfully propose “The Wounded White Elephant.” David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

The City is refusing to provide records that would show who knew what, and when they knew it. FOLLOWING OUR STORY LAST EDITION about the surprise appearance of bolt-on plates on the new bridge that Victorians had been promised would be “world-class” and “iconic,” the reaction from ordinary people who don’t receive a regular cheque from the City of Victoria was consistently forthright. An English bridge designer, who has written about such projects all over the world for the past 10 years noted: “The latest reports from Focus cover issues with the bridge’s steel fabrication. They highlight the discovery of a problem with the steelwork, which appears to have been covered over with a truly awful-looking bolted plate, a real bodge if ever you see one…Focus is quite right to criticize the detail. It’s clear from the photographs that nothing this awful should be considered acceptable as part of the finished structure.” Controversial bolt-on plates on Victoria's brand-new $115-million bridge. The larger photo above shows the plate on the south-side ring. On Vibrant Victoria, a local online discussion forum, “jonny” noted: “I am absolutely gobsmacked that our NINE FIGURE shiny new bridge has two, seemingly haphazard and last minute, bolted-on steel plates that look like they were envisaged and put together by a 9th grade metalworking student.” “G-Man” responded, “Couldn’t agree more. It makes me want to puke. I could not care less whether or not an engineer says it’s okay. The brand new bridge should not have this. It is unbelievable. I am embarrassed as a Victorian.” Several days later, G-Man posted a photograph of the bolt-on plate on the north ring. Somehow a bolt had worked its way free from somewhere inside the ring and was trying to escape through a large gap between the ring and the bolt-on plate. A rusty bolt caught in the opening between the bolt-on plate and the defective north-side ring. Photo by G-Man. Martin Bache, a 40-year veteran of Canada’s structural steel fabrication industry, and a project supervisor with Canron in Vancouver before retiring to Victoria, wrote to Focus and commented: “I have never seen such an appalling patch.” Bache agreed that the plates would “promote corrosion” in the structure. He had contacted EGBC, BC’s association of professional engineers, which confirmed that the association’s bylaws require a third party independent review of the patches since they are on fracture-critical steel. No such review has been brought forward, or even mentioned, by either the City or the bridge’s American designers, Hardesty & Hanover. I covered the initial response from City Hall in a second story posted at focusonvictoria.ca. To put that response as succinctly as possible, the City claimed our story contained “serious factual errors and inaccuracies,” but was unwilling—or unable, to say what those errors and inaccuracies were. On January 25, Project Director Jonathan Huggett gave council his quarterly update on the troubled project. Huggett commented on the bolt-on plates: “There has been this inference by some that somebody found a piece of scrap steel, slapped it on as an afterthought, and put a few bolts in place. Whoever makes those statements clearly has no experience in engineering. As engineers we take great pride in our work. Nothing happens quickly or suddenly, and without due process and proper sign-off.” Huggett also told the CBC our story was "an attempt to scare people unnecessarily." Presumably Huggett meant that there was an implication in our story that the plates were a public safety issue. We didn't, in fact, say or imply any such thing. The issue we raised is whether or not the plates represent a significant decline in value to taxpayers. Will the plates promote corrosion and therefore increase maintenance costs? Will they reduce the useful life of the bridge and thereby increase lifecycle cost? Do the plates not make a sham of the City's claim to a "world-class" or "iconic" bridge and raise questions about the huge amount of money wasted in pursuit of that futile endeavour? The bridge engineers themselves may have metal fatigue concerns—that's why they added the plates—but Focus raised no red flags on that point other than to mention the project's own concern about fatigue. Huggett's claim of "an attempt to scare people unnecessarily" is simply deflecting attention away from the real issues. The “pride” Huggett claims has gone into this project is hard to see when you examine closely the two patches on the new bridge. And, if they are any indication of the pride with which the rest of the bridge has been built, Victorians could be in for more embarrassment. But it’s Huggett’s claim that “nothing happens…without due process” that is the focus of my attention this time. What has become evident is that Huggett may not have informed anyone at City Hall about the problem that led to the bolt-on plates, thus making it impossible to consider options that would have prevented the delivery of a defective bridge. With Mayor Helps and Huggett refusing to respond to our questions, Focus requested relevant records under access to information law. So far, Huggett and the City have been uncooperative and Focus has filed a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. In my initial story I raised these questions: Were City councillors informed about the situation that led to the bolt-on plates? If so, were they given any options? It’s vital to have answers to these questions. The plates reflect an unacceptable diminishment of the expected quality of the bridge. According to Huggett, people are comparing the bridge to scrap metal. The plates also reflect a lower-cost solution to the problem they were intended to address than a proper refabrication, but the parties building the bridge would have been responsible for any additional cost. Someone’s choice to overlook the public interest and accept a defective bridge has saved the companies building the bridge a lot of money, perhaps millions of dollars. Are councillors responsible for this bad decision? Or were they kept in the dark by Project Director Huggett? Thus far, the only indication of what happened that led to the bolt-on plates has been the minimal response from Huggett that I reported in my first story, and a letter from Hardesty & Hanover’s Keith Griesing sent to the City on January 8, shortly after our story was published. After reading our story, Griesing “felt it would be helpful if I gave you a brief summary of why those plates are there and how their use came to be.” Griesing is the project’s engineer of record. Griesing disagreed with our characterization of the circumstance that led to the bolt-on plates as a “design flaw.” His letter stated: “There was no ‘design flaw’ by Hardesty & Hanover nor any other of the City consultants involved; it was assembly by the fabricator that did not conform to the design plan requirements nor to the applicable detailing and fabrication standards required in the specifications” that led to the need for the bolt-on plates. Griesing’s need to make a distinction between a “design flaw” and “assembly by the fabricator” is understandably important to Hardesty & Hanover. If the bolt-on plates resulted from some error made by Hardesty & Hanover, they could become defendants in a legal suit if City councillors realize a world-class bodge has been foisted on City taxpayers. If the cause was solely attributable to an error made by the fabricator, then the company the City contracted to build the bridge—PCL—would be the defendant. But Hardesty & Hanover’s concern is not equal to the public interest. Just because Griesing claims Hardesty & Hanover aren’t responsible for the weakness in the rings that required the plates doesn’t mean the City hasn’t received a defective bridge. City councillors ought to be focussed on which companies the City should consider suing, rather than resorting to talking points designed to relieve them of any responsibility for their failure to protect the public interest. And just because Huggett tells City councillors there was “no design error” doesn’t mean his apparent concealment of the issue isn’t an issue. Councillors need to examine carefully the role Huggett played in the delivery of a world-class bodge. An examination of what information has been provided by the project shows none of the questions about who did what—and when and why they did it—have been answered. The bridge builders seem to have the support of Victoria City council in avoiding any financial or professional accountability for providing a defective bridge. Why? In his letter to councillors, Griesing attributes the need for the bolt-on plates to errors made by the Chinese company ZTSS, hired by PCL to fabricate the moveable part of the bridge. Griesing states: “In the course of our routine quality inspections in the steel fabrication plant in China, [PCL’s] quality control team [Atema] discovered a violation of fabrication and welding standards in the particular area in question. This determination was confirmed by the City’s Quality Oversight consultant.” According to Huggett, this discovery was made on December 9, 2016. What was found? Huggett provided Focus with a single sentence from Atema’s report. It stated: “Weld access holes in MW1 and MW3 to MF1 and TF1 at MW2 were unnecessary, not clearly detailed and may not have been evaluated to proper fatigue design category, and not fabricated to code requirements”. That’s largely incomprehensible to most of us, but here’s the essential part: Atema found “unnecessary” weld access holes in steel parts close to where the bolt-on plates were eventually added. Weld access holes are openings into otherwise closed chambers inside the rings that allow welders to complete welds within those closed chambers. Why would ZTSS cut “unnecessary” holes if it didn’t need them? With Huggett refusing to provide any information, I sought insight from the aforementioned Martin Bache, who has 40 years of experience in heavy steel fabrication. Bache described the process that would have been used for determining where such holes are needed: “Weld access holes in fracture-critical members must be designed by the Engineer of Record [Griesing]. Competent detail draftspersons would be expected, during preparation of the shop drawings, to identify closed chambers where the EOR may have forgotten to show on his plans weld access holes without which the required welding cannot be performed. They would then issue an RFI [request for information] pointing this out, and asking the EOR how they should proceed.” According to Bache, then, Griesing would ultimately be responsible for the design of every weld access hole that was required, since every steel member in the rings was designated “fracture-critical.” Griesing has told the City that the fabricator was responsible for the weld access hole violations. In that case, the bad holes wouldn’t have appeared on the shop drawings Griesing was required to approve. That means they should have been discovered quickly by any robust quality assurance (QA) program. If found quickly, those holes would still be accessible and could be fixed immediately. Bache noted: “Under what we must imagine would be rigorous QA on this second attempt to fabricate a bridge, we would expect an error to be spotted very soon after the occurrence.” But according to Griesing, “Because of its location in a critical area of the structure, this non-conformance was particularly difficult to correct.” Why, exactly? If the QA teams were as diligent as Huggett claimed in his quarterly reports, why would “unnecessary” access holes just cut by fabricators end up being “particularly difficult to correct.” From what Huggett has told Focus, we know that Hardesty & Hanover’s decision on how to address these unnecessary holes was delayed for six to seven months. During that time, fabrication of the bridge continued. It appears that Hardesty & Hanover dithered on fixing the unnecessary weld access holes, which were made inaccessible by subsequent work and couldn’t be fixed. Did Griesing forget to tell someone to do something? Bache wrote: “What amazes me is the tremendous time gap between the Atema non-compliance report and the attempted fixes. It sounds as though no one at Hardesty & Hanover could decide what to do, but the work continued and the bridge was shipped anyway to try to keep to a schedule.” Griesing’s explanation to the City noted: “The design team and fabrication team designed and reviewed numerous mitigation options. We even consulted two internationally known experts in fabrication and welding for their input. After reviewing all options, the project team unanimously agreed that the bolted plates were the best option, all factors considered.” Griesing, obviously, did not factor in jonny or G-Man. Maybe he should have. G-Man and jonny seem to represent the values and priorities of ordinary Victorians better than either Huggett or Helps. It wasn’t until after the rings had arrived in Victoria, late last summer, that large holes were chopped in the rings and plates bolted over the holes. That work was done at Point Hope Shipyard in Victoria. The need for these large holes is unclear. Were they needed to allow someone to get inside the rings so bolts could be inserted from the inside and tightened? If so, what happened to the tightener? Hey, we just want to know. Griesing’s letter provided no explanation for why a fix wasn’t made immediately in December 2016 when the unnecessary access holes would still have been accessible. So while Huggett and Griesing have successfully focussed the City on shooting the messenger, more important questions that need to be answered are being ignored. Let me, just for the sake of thoroughness, offer an alternative story to that being told by Huggett, Griesing and Helps. Let’s start with Atema’s report. Although we’ve been provided with only one sentence from that report, let’s presume that sentence is the whole report and that Atema did find weld access holes that were unnecessary and that those unnecessary holes are the entire reason bolt-on plates were required. All of those assumptions are leaps of faith, but let’s jump. In that case, PCL would have been responsible for the cost of any refabrication necessary to meet the City’s agreed-upon specifications defined in the contract. If the City had been given all the facts about this when it happened, the City would surely have insisted on refabrication rather than accepting a bridge that would forever wear “truly awful-looking” bolt-on plates. But wait. According to Griesing, the City did know about the issue. In his letter, Griesing wrote, “City Staff was fully involved in arriving at the best solution, particularly with respect to public safety, cost and schedule impacts.” The “was” in that sentence suggests a single person from the City was involved, but we don’t know for sure. Who did Griesing mean by “City Staff”? Did he mean just Huggett? Or did he mean Huggett and other people at City Hall? Again, we don’t know the answer to this yet, because Huggett has refused to respond to a legal request for his records on the issue, and Helps won’t respond to questions. But this is vital to understand because if Huggett didn’t inform anyone else at the City of Victoria, we would have to ask why he kept that information from his client. Until we see Huggett’s record of communication on the plates, no judgement can be made as to his conduct. But at this point, with Huggett appearing to have not properly informed his client, the City may need to seek advice about the implications of the plates from someone not involved in the project. Griesing’s claim that it wasn’t a “design flaw” that led to the bolt-on plates is an open question until detailed information about what Atema found, and why it took six or seven months for Griesing to act, is released. But there is a broader issue that deserves comment. In one sense there is no question that the bolt-on plates are the direct consequence of a design flaw. The design flaw was the open rings themselves. The choice of that particular design approach to creating a movable bridge made the structure unnecessarily complex, difficult to build and overly expensive. Of the three companies originally bidding for the project, two rejected the open-ring design and based their bids on designs that had proven track records. Kiewit’s engineers had concluded that the open rings posed “a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” Bizarrely, the City’s scoring of the bid proposals actually penalized Kiewit and Walsh for not using the risky design. As part of PCL’s bid, Hardesty & Hanover embraced this risky design. Victoria taxpayers have been paying the costs ever since. For example: two additional years of construction are attributable to difficulty in fabricating the open rings and fitting them to the trusses. Those extra two years of construction have made people in Victoria frustrated. That sense of frustration, especially in an election year, is not something politicians like Helps and her councillors want to aggravate with further delays. Their public promise to deliver the bridge by such-and-such a date meant that if any problem arose that would cause further delay, councillors were going to favour whatever solution was quickest. They telegraphed that to Huggett and Griesing. So that’s what councillors got, but in spades. So when Griesing tells councillors that the bolt-on plates are not the result of a design flaw, he’s overlooking his company’s responsibility for promoting a design that other engineers warned the City not to build. Hardesty & Hanover’s risky and hard-to-build design created a whole chain of connected events that led inevitably to the bolt-on plates. Don’t take my word for it. Huggett has already confirmed that the City's hired technical advisors have given it bad advice on the project. Last summer, in a rare moment of self-reflection in which councillors had an opportunity to openly consider why the project had encountered such difficulties, Councillor Pam Madoff offered the following: “I remember very specifically having this conversation [with the bridge’s designers and engineers] about the mechanics, you know, the—in simplistic terms—the cogs, the wheels, how it was going to lift. I remember at the time saying, ‘Is this basically just a larger version of the Meccano sets that we played with as kids, in terms of its actual mechanical operation?’ And, again, that was the assurance. To me it comes down to: how far does one have to go? We felt like we asked the right questions at the time. It turns out they may not have been the right answers.” In response, Huggett told councillors: “You were not given good advice.” A question councillors might ask themselves right now: Why are we still accepting bad advice? Perhaps a sloppily-executed sign with those words on it could be hung from each of the bolt-on plates. With or without such signs, though, each time the bridge lifts and the bolt-on plates descend to the level of pedestrians waiting for the bridge to reopen, those present will be reminded of the bridge’s dubious origins. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. Hardesty & Hanover's letter to the City of Victoria with its explanation of the bolt-on plates:

Did Mayor Helps conceal a serious bridge design flaw from other councillors and the public at a critical moment? Only the expeditious public release of pertinent records will show what happened. TWO BOLT-ON PLATES DEFACING THE FRACTURE-CRITICAL RINGS of the new Johnson Street Bridge aren’t a problem, according to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps. The real problem, Helps stated in a Facebook post, were “a number of serious factual errors and inaccuracies” made by me in my story about the issue in the January/February edition of Focus. Below her Facebook statement Helps endorsed comments posted anonymously on the social media site reddit. On reddit, anyone can call themselves an “engineer” by providing an email address to a computerized registration system. Helps’ and her Facebook fans were moved by the assurances of reddit “engineers” HollywoodTK and thisguy86 that there was nothing unusual about a new $115-million bridge sporting repair patches before it even opened. My own article on the issue, on the other hand, even though it is likely subject to the careful scrutiny of libel lawyers working for the companies and professionals named in the article, is, according to Helps, untrustworthy. I will come back to Mayor Helps’ role in the City’s response to the issue, but first let me report on information that came in after publication of my original story. Firstly, City of Victoria Councillor Jeremy Loveday confirmed that he had not been informed about the issue before he read our story. Loveday’s statement seems to suggest that Project Director Jonathan Huggett, a professional engineer, did not properly inform his client—the City of Victoria—about a significant structural issue that had arisen during construction of the rings in China. However, it’s also possible that Loveday is the only person at City Hall that wasn’t told. Secondly, photos taken in Victoria show the work of cutting steel out of the rings and then adding the bolt-on plates took place at Point Hope Shipyard in Victoria in October. Thirdly, engineers and experts in steel fabrication have expressed concern that the bolt-on steel plates will likely create a corrosion problem that could increase maintenance costs and shorten the useful life of the bridge. While social media comments have focussed on the way in which the steel plates diminish the structure’s aesthetic value, the plates may end up costing City of Victoria taxpayers tens of millions of dollars as a result of premature loss of use. Professional engineers and steel fabrication experts that have contacted Focus have confirmed that the concerns we identified in our story are reasonable. Even with only one sentence of the Atema report that first identified a weakness in the rings during construction in China, engineers confirmed that at least partial responsibility for the issue likely lies with the rings’ designers, Hardesty & Hanover. Until the full Atema report is released, the full extent of Hardesty & Hanover’s responsibility for the weakness in the rings is unknown. If the City had insisted on rings that did not have bolt-on plates, whatever additional costs were incurred would have been borne by the various parties to the extent they were responsible for the weakness in the rings. The extent of blame assigned to each of the parties involved is unknown. What we do know is that Hardesty & Hanover’s Engineer of Record for the project was able to sign off on a cheap, bolted-on plate solution even though he was the Engineer of Record at least partly responsible for the structural weakness that needed to be addressed. The record of how all this played out needs to be made public since there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at work in what occurred, with City of Victoria taxpayers coming out on the losing end. Following publication of our story, a concerned steel fabrication expert asked Engineers and Geoscientists of BC (EGBC) to confirm that the addition of bolt-on plates to the fracture-critical rings needed to be approved by an engineer other than the Engineer of Record. The EGBC confirmed that such an approval would have been required and directed the expert to Hardesty & Hanover’s Keith Griesing, the Engineer of Record, for Griesing’s confirmation that such a review took place. In response to advice from one professional engineer, we checked EGBC’s online membership directory to confirm that Griesing is a registered professional engineer in BC. The EGBC did not confirm his membership. Griesing has not yet responded to a request for information from Focus. The expert in steel fabrication told Focus, “I believe it is not necessary for the Engineer of Record to be registered as a member of EGBC provided that he is registered as an Engineer in a jurisdiction acceptable to EGBC.” Lastly, we have learned that the public statements issued separately by Helps and Loveday—the same statements, word-for-word—were provided to them by City Manager Jocelyn Jenkins. Since Jenkins is not an engineer, the claim Loveday and Helps made that what we reported in our story as a “design flaw” should have been called a “fabrication challenge” had to come from Huggett. (Loveday has since apologized for not making it clear that his statement was copied from a briefing note. Mayor Helps’ has made no such clarification.) The entire attempt to build architect Sebastien Ricard’s unproven design has definitely been a “fabrication challenge,” but the specific way in which a structural weakness had been engineered into the rings remains a design flaw until further, more complete information proves otherwise. Aside from the important issues of safety, lowered life expectancy and diminished aesthetic value, there are other questions involving professional and political conduct that need to be examined. If it isn’t clear to you already, let me outline why the City’s characterization of our story as “a number of serious factual errors and inaccuracies” ought to be seen as obfuscation—a non-denial denial, as I predicted in my initial story. The weakness in the rings was first identified on December 9, 2016 in China. At the time, the rings were still being fabricated. Reinforcing the problematic section of the rings in a way that would not create long-term corrosion problems or diminish the aesthetic value of the bridge was still possible. Since the cost of that refabrication would have been the responsibility of those companies whose work had contributed to the structural weakness in the rings, the best interests of the City of Victoria would have been served by refabrication. But that didn’t happen. Why not? On the surface, it appears that no one in Victoria was told, so there was no opportunity for the City to consider its options. If the City had been told, and it had insisted on refabrication—and why wouldn’t it?—who would have had to pay? Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL. Somehow, Victoria got a defective bridge and PCL and Hardesty & Hanover got a free pass. What happened? Huggett should have been informed about the Atema report’s findings shortly after December 9, 2016. If he was, it’s not clear whether he even notified the City. The evidence that he didn’t tell his client, so far, is the absence of any mention of the issue in his public reports, and Councillor Loveday’s public statement that our story was the first he had heard of the issue. So let’s pursue—cautiously—the hypothetical case in which Huggett told no one at City Hall. What would be the implications of that? Keep in mind that Huggett is paid approximately $300,000 each year by taxpayers to watch over the City’s interests on the project. If Huggett had told no one, the main beneficiary of such a concealment would have been Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL. But Huggett’s client is the City of Victoria. If this was how things happened—Huggett telling no one—how would we expect a sensible mayor to act when the existence of the design flaw was publicized by Focus? A sensible mayor would see that if Huggett had kept the City in the dark, that would have allowed Hardesty & Hanover and/or PCL to avoid the higher cost of refabrication as compared with bolt-on plates. A sensible, cautious mayor would, on first hearing of this issue, understand that Huggett’s apparent failure to inform her would require the immediate production of all the records that could show exactly what took place during the nearly eight months between the Atema report and shipment of the rings to Victoria. Otherwise, public trust in civic government would plummet. A sensible mayor would demand: “Release the records.” But that didn’t happen. Rather than acting swiftly to push for release of those records, Helps parrotted Huggett’s statement, assuring the public that the real problems plaguing the bridge project were serious factual errors and inaccuracies in the observations of the guy who first noticed the bolt-on plates. So, given that Helps is a reasonably sensible mayor who is perfectly capable of sniffing out corruption, we can likely reject the hypothesis that Huggett didn’t tell anyone at City Hall. That leads us, inevitably, to the only other reasonable hypothetical possibility—that Huggett informed one or more officials at City Hall, and that between them they decided that the best course of action was to keep the issue concealed from Loveday (and probably other councillors) and settle for a quick, cheap fix that kept the bridge on schedule for completion well before next November’s civic election, bolt-on plates and all. Let’s cautiously explore this possibility. As a reporter, I’ve found that when public officials won’t answer direct questions, they are usually trying to avoid public embarrassment. It’s awful to be publicly embarrassed, but public embarrassment is a powerful and legitimate tool that has been traditionally used to hold people accountable for their actions when they screw up some decision they had to make. In preparation for my initial story, after Huggett declined to say whether he had informed the City, I emailed questions to Mayor Helps, including whether she had been filled in by Huggett on the issue. The questions were simple and could have been answered with a “Yes” or a “No.” I also asked her for important dates when things might have happened. The mayor did not respond to any of five emails sent over a one-week period. Then, following Helps’ release of the Huggett-Jenkins statement on her Facebook page and her implicit endorsement of the anonymous reddit engineers, I emailed her a request to itemize the “serious factual errors and inaccuracies” she had referenced in her statement. Normally, a public official that makes such a claim would have proactively provided that information without being asked. That’s the process: We make a mistake, the official tells us about the mistake we made, and if they are correct we acknowledge our error. So I asked the mayor to make those mistakes clear. Then something peculiar happened. Mayor Helps’ inadvertently copied me on a “proposed response” to my questions that she had meant to send only to Jenkins and Huggett and one other City staffer. “Do you see any downfalls in this approach?” the mayor asked Huggett and Jenkins. Later, realizing what she had done, Helps emailed me: “David there you have my response. Sent before my morning meditation and copied to you inadvertently. But truth may walk through the world unarmed. So please feel free to use what I have said.” She had written: “I trust all of the reporters at the Times Colonist. I trust all of the reporters at Vic News. I trust all of the reporters at CBC and CFAX. I trust all of the reporters at CTV, CHEK, and GLOBAL. This trust has come through hard conversations, good reporting and relationship building. I do not trust you. As such I feel that however I answer your questions you will use the answers to suit your own needs, not to serve the public good.” Mayor Helps made no attempt to point out even a single error or inaccuracy. The mayor’s insistence that Focus needs to negotiate stories with her before she will provide factual information is an interesting issue all by itself, but it’s not the issue at hand so let’s not be diverted by it. Why wouldn’t the mayor respond in a straightforward manner and provide the “serious factual errors and inaccuracies”? Added to her failure to answer questions for the first story, my reporter’s nose tells me Mayor Helps is hiding something. Here’s what now appears to me to be the most likely chain of events: Atema issued its report in December 2016. Huggett informed then-City Manager Jason Johnson. Johnson informed Helps and perhaps City engineering staff. Between them they decided to accept the quickest fix to the weak-rings problem and to conceal the issue from the other councillors and the public, perhaps thinking that no one would notice the bolt-on plates. Now the City is busily trying to hide their miscalculations and errors in judgement to avoid embarrassment. If I’m wrong, and neither Helps nor Huggett have anything to hide, all they need to do to prove that is to release the full Atema report, the record of all Huggett’s communications about that report and the bolt-on plates, and the required independent third-party review of the proposed fix, if that was done. Then all local media can share that information with the public, which will then be better able to gauge whether the public interest—or a corporate, political or personal interest—was served by the actions of whoever was involved. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. He has been, reluctantly, following the bridge issue for about nine years.

The latest cover-up on the $115-million project raises the question: What needs to change at Victoria City Hall? LIKE MANY VICTORIANS, I visited the Johnson Street Bridge construction site in early December to check out the newly-erected rings. My attention was immediately drawn to two large, heavily-bolted plates attached to the underside of each of the rings at the 12-o’clock position. Uh-oh. As you may know, I have been watching this project closely, for nine years. No such plates had ever appeared in any of the detailed construction drawings or project photographs that I had seen over the past five years of construction. I snapped a few photographs. At home, blown up, the photos showed that the welded steel rings—which took three years to fabricate in China—had recently been cut open. Steel plates, angle steel and hundreds of bolts had then been placed over the openings. This assemblage had a “quick-and-dirty” appearance, the kind of short-term repair you might expect to see on a bridge deemed to be near the end of its useful life—not at the start. As a result of a flaw in its structural design, the signature feature of the new bridge—the rings—required the addition of external bolt-on plates (inset). I sent my photos to Project Director Jonathan Huggett and asked him for an explanation. Over Huggett’s nearly four years on the job, I’ve sent him questions several times. Before this, he hadn’t answered a single question. In his last non-response, he had explained, “I am very busy trying to deal with a multitude of issues right now.” I didn’t expect to hear from him this time, either, but he surprised me. In an email, Huggett revealed that Atema—the quality-control company hired by the City of Victoria to monitor fabrication in China of the large steel parts of the bridge—had issued a “non-compliance report” (NCR) on December 9, 2016 after an inspection of the rings. Atema’s report indicated the structure contained a design flaw that could leave the rings vulnerable to metal fatigue. In response to discovery of the design flaw, Huggett says, “Lengthy discussions occurred in China and North America during the first half of 2017 and a number of different options to remedy the comments in the NCR were presented and reviewed. After discussions involving many experts in steel fabrication, the Engineer of Record agreed to design a bolt-on steel plate to ensure that the rings had not only the required strength, but also met the fatigue design requirements for the opening and closing of the bridge. This amended design was carried out and signed off by the Engineer of Record.” Wow. That’s a dramatically understated admission that the project had gone dangerously off the rails. After three years of fabrication, the rings had to be hacked into with cutting torches and hastily repaired. Yet not one of Huggett’s public reports to City councillors even hinted at such a problem. Huggett apparently had no intention of publicly acknowledging the design flaw, or the repair, unless someone else brought it up. Were those his instructions from the City? One question that immediately occurred to me: Is this the structure’s only design flaw? Huggett, a private engineering consultant, was appointed project director in 2014 by the City of Victoria after a report he authored condemned the project for its lack of leadership. He billed the City about $300,000 for his services, including expenses, in 2017. When pressed for more information, including the date he had informed City of Victoria officials about the design flaw, Huggett simply responded: “We have no additional information to provide.” If Huggett had informed anyone at City Hall about the design flaw, it most likely would have been City Manager Jason Johnson, who hired Huggett in 2014. But Johnson was fired by City council shortly after the rings arrived in Victoria, so I was unable to confirm whether Huggett told Johnson about the design flaw and repair. Five emails to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps asking her to confirm whether or not Huggett had informed City councillors all went unanswered. I’ll come back to the question of why City Hall is reluctant to acknowledge what has happened, but first let me describe more exactly what was done to the rings after the design flaw was discovered. (If some readers have a hard time wading through this account, my apologies. I am hoping that an engineer with bridge design and/or bridge construction experience will come forward to comment on the repair that has been done to the new bridge.) I provided Huggett with a written description of what appears to be a hastily-executed repair that has been made to both rings and asked him to correct any part of my description so that it would accurately reflect the “amended design” for the public record. Huggett provided no correction. Sometime after the trial fit-up of all the major parts of the bridge in China in March 2017, significant, identical alterations were made to each ring. This included cutting out a section of steel plate from the inside flange of each ring. Steel appears to have been removed from the centre of each ring right out to their outer edge. This removal included about one metre of steel along the edge of the rings, including the weld. This project photo of the south ring in March, 2017 shows the intended design. Despite having known about the design flaw for over three months, the project then proceeded in such a way as to make it impossible to back-track and properly address the issue. Later, a large section of steel (in the area indicated by the yellow circle) was cut away from both rings and then covered over with bolt-on plates. These cutouts in the rings would have allowed access to the interior of the ring. Work may have been done inside the rings to address the fatigue issue identified by Atema. A photograph of the rings taken during their fabrication (see below) shows an abrupt narrowing of the structural steel in the same area where, later, the bolt-on plates were installed. This abrupt transition in the structure, along with an internal access port, may have prompted Atema’s report. The south ring during fabrication in China in July 2016. The yellow circle indicates the area of the ring later red-lined by Atema’s non-compliance report. Whether or not any steel was then added to the internal structure of the rings is unknown. If not, the next step would have involved attaching the external plates, which are about two metres by two metres in size. That required drilling 180 approximately three-quarter-inch-diameter holes into each ring, with matching holes in the plates. The plates are bolted along the edge of each ring to a steel angle that protrudes from the gap cut in the rings. The angles are bolted to the inside of the rings’ side webs. Filler pieces roughly support the plates at their forward edges where the plates span an uneven surface. The plates appear to be deformed (bent) across this uneven surface. One question that arises: Wouldn’t drilling a large number of holes, in a small area that had already been identified as having a weakness, further weaken the rings? The rings are considered “fracture-critical,” which implies their failure could lead to collapse of the bridge. As well, gaps and joints between the rings’ original steel and the bolted-on steel parts, evident in photographs, seem to make it possible for moisture to get between the steel surfaces and from there into the bolt holes. If that happens, corrosion would occur. The plates, angle steel and bolts introduce the need for careful, ongoing inspection, additional maintenance and future repair that would not have been required if a properly fabricated structure had been delivered. While many questions require answers from the City, what is known seems straightforward and damning: The design flaw was pointed out by a company whose actual job was to certify the grade of steel being used, monitor the quality of the welding, and ensure fabrication proceeded according to drawings that originated with Hardesty & Hanover, the company that engineered the steel lifting section of the bridge. Its drawings were supposed to be checked and approved by the City’s project manager, MMM Group, which has billed the City for close to $20 million for its services on the project since 2009. Fabrication of the lifting section began in China in early 2014. So it took nearly three years before anyone noticed this flaw in Hardesty & Hanover’s design, and then it was discovered by someone not responsible for the engineering of the structure. The structural integrity of this part of the bridge was judged to be so far below standard that an extraordinary intervention was required. It then took, according to Huggett, another six or seven months before a decision was made about how to address the flaw. Part of that decision included choosing to conceal the problem from the public. Another part of the decision was to do a quick-and-dirty repair. Is that because the rings had already been shipped to Victoria, precluding a proper repair at the steel fabrication plant in China? So many questions with no answers. While the Engineer of Record may have “signed off” on the bolt-on plates, the Engineer of Record works for the same company—Hardesty & Hanover—that engineered the structural flaw into the design in the first place. As engineers, their work is now suspect and their stamp of approval on their solution to a problem they created seems fraught with potential for conflict of interest. Wouldn’t City of Victoria councillors have wanted to obtain an independent, disinterested assessment of the proposed fix? Did they? If councillors had been made aware of this flaw and its proposed remedy, and agreed to accept a substandard bridge anyway, they have a lot to answer for—public oversight of the project appears to have failed. Until the City of Victoria makes it clear whether or not Huggett informed City officials of the circumstances related to the design flaw, it ought to be assumed that he did. If that’s the case, City councillors will need to explain the basis for their decision to accept a bridge that needed to be repaired. At the very least, they ought to provide public answers to the following: 1. When were City councillors informed about the design flaw? 2. When were they informed about the proposed fix? 3. Did the City of Victoria obtain an opinion from an independent professional engineer—one with no previous involvement with any of the parties undertaking the project—as to whether the City should agree to the proposed fix? 4. In return for accepting a substandard bridge, has the City of Victoria obtained a long-term guarantee from the builder (PCL), beyond the limited two-year warranty previously agreed to, that the damaged rings will be replaced by the builder if the repair shows any sign of deterioration or failure over the expected life of the bridge? 5. Were councillors planning on informing the public of the design flaw and repair before the coming civic election? It has taken 9 years and, if we’re honest, about $115 million to build a 156-metre-long bridge that needed to be repaired before it could be opened.Why has this happened to our city? Long before this particular design flaw emerged and its cover-up commenced, the project had repeatedly reduced the value of the bridge being built, each time concealing that fact from the public. Focus has documented this sad history, right from the project’s origins in 2008. This seems an appropriate moment to recount why this troubled project has turned out the way it has. THE LONG RECORD OF CONCEALMENT OF PROBLEMS with the bridge’s design and construction seems to be a natural consequence of the project’s controversial origins, and the haste with which a conceptual design was chosen. The project was born at the height of the world financial crisis in late 2008 and early 2009, when governments around the planet rushed forward with gigantic plans for infrastructure spending to stimulate the global economy. In Victoria, the possibility of a big federal-provincial grant appeared just after the City had received an engineering assessment of the condition of the 86-year-old Johnson Street Bridge. This unfortunate coincidence determined the fundamental nature of the project that followed: It was hurried, and therefore ill-conceived. To justify going after a big grant, whose application deadline was only weeks away, City officials had to quickly manufacture a plausible rationale for replacing the Johnson Street Bridge. They did that by abruptly announcing that the Johnson Street Bridge had a serious seismic vulnerability. On top of that, the City claimed that repairing the bridge would require lengthy closure—at great economic cost to Downtown businesses. Since that repair would be only marginally less expensive than building a new bridge at $40 million, the City argued, building a new bridge was the best choice. But before the City took that position, it had been advised, unequivocally, by two professional engineers on two separate occasions, to repair the double bridge rather than replace it. The first engineer to provide that direction, Joost Meyboom, told the City in 2008 that an adequate repair, including seismic upgrading, would cost $8.6 million. The second engineer, Mark Mulvihill, gave the same advice in 2009. Mulvihill based his recommendation on the structure’s “high and significant” heritage values. But Meyboom’s and Mulvihill’s professional recommendations were concealed by the City, and were only revealed through FOIs filed well after City council had committed to a new bridge. That’s how the project started. Founded on a fundamentally deceptive approach to providing information about the project, City managers went on to repeat—for the next nine years—that same pattern of misrepresentation and concealment in response to every major challenge that came along. Instead of following Meyboom’s and Mulvihill’s recommendations, the City placed its bet on a back-of-the-envelope concept created by Sebastien Ricard at the British architectural firm Wilkinson Eyre. Inexplicably, Ricard’s design depended on a novel open-ring (no axle) lifting mechanism that had previously been used for only two small bridges in the Canary Wharf development in London. Just a few years old, the bridges had almost no record of performance or durability. Nor was there any proof that the open-ring design could be successfully scaled up to the size proposed for Victoria. By July 2009 the City was estimating the project would cost $63 million. When it tried to proceed without electors’ consent, a counter-petition—mounted in the middle of a cold winter by indignant Victoria citizens—successfully forced the City to put its plan to a referendum. The City’s response to that setback, in preparation for a vote, was to spend heavily on creating the perception that building a new bridge would be less expensive than repairing the existing structure, and that Ricard’s design would allow a number of highly desirable features: dedicated bicycle lanes, rail, a high level of seismic protection, a wider navigational channel and a “signature” structure with high-level architectural qualities that would make the bridge “world class” and “iconic.” Sebastien Ricard’s glamorous, but hastily-conceived, 2010 design was approved by voters in a borrowing referendum. Critics of the project, like Ross Crockford, a director of the watchdog organization that had forced the City to hold a referendum, pointed to the unproven, experimental nature of the design. To Crockford— who, unlike the City, had sought out the advice of bridge engineers not involved in the project—the design presented an unnecessary financial risk to City taxpayers. The design flaw discovered by Atema is exactly the kind of risk critics like Crockford warned the City about, before and after the referendum. The City ignored those warnings, and so did the majority of City voters. In the November 2010 referendum, electors approved the City’s now-$77-million-plan. Soon after the referendum had been won, project engineers and City staff quietly began stripping away most of the promised elements of the project’s scope, even as the project’s cost continued to climb. The first things to go were rail and a wider navigational channel. Ricard’s renderings of the bridge from 2010 all show a bridge wide enough to accommodate rail and long enough to allow a navigational channel 47 metres wide. But records obtained by Focus showed that project engineers suspected Ricard’s open-ring design couldn’t actually accommodate either. By early 2011, MMM engineers were gathering evidence to help convince City managers, behind closed doors, that the City should build a much smaller bridge. By mid-2011 the City had signed a design contract with MMM that, contrary to promises made before the referendum, eliminated rail, reduced the opening span from 47 to 41 metres, and reduced the required life expectancy of the approach bridges from 100 years to 75 years. There was no proactive disclosure of these latter two reductions in quality and scope. They only became known to councillors and the public later, through FOIs filed by Focus. The shortage of truthfulness wasn’t confined to the engineers. Just before the civic election in 2011, City Manager Gail Stephens announced that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million and the March 2016 timeline.” But, as we learned much later, she was hiding the truth from both councillors and the public. An FOI filed in 2012 showed Stephens had been warned months before by City staff that the project was definitely over budget. Those staff advised her that councillors should be informed. Stephens failed to do so. As for her claim of being on schedule for completion by March 2016, the truth of that is now evident. In mid-2012, while the City was working with three companies short-listed to bid on the bridge’s construction contract, two significant changes were made to the project’s scope. Each of these changes was made to lower the cost of the project after the three companies bidding on the contract made it clear the City’s recently-expanded $93-million budget would not cover the cost of even the shrunken bridge it wanted them to build. The first of these changes was a decision to leave the support piers of the existing bridge in place. That would eliminate the cost of removing and disposing of the piers, but this also resulted in losing one of the primary objectives of the project: a wider navigational channel under the bridge. The width of the channel was limited by the existing piers which were 39 metres apart. Leaving them in place meant the navigational clearance would be virtually the same, with no reduction in the risk of marine traffic hitting the bridge. Project managers hid this change, too, from councillors, who were left to learn about it from the pages of Focus. At the same time, in mid-2012, City managers secretly accepted a lower standard of seismic performance for the bridge. While no engineer can, with great certainty, guarantee that a bridge will be accessible to traffic after a large earthquake, MMM engineer Joost Meyboom had convinced the City that it should buy the highest level of seismic protection possible. Meyboom put the cost of that protection at $10 million and, during the 2010 referendum, electors were told the bridge would include that high level of protection. However, after it had been established (in secret) by the three companies bidding for the construction contract that MMM’s estimate of cost was too low, MMM introduced a document into the procurement process that accepted a much lower level of seismic performance than Meyboom had previously advised the City to accept. This document’s reduced seismic design criteria allowed for the replacement of the planned all-steel approach bridges with more economical—but more seismically vulnerable— concrete structures. Again, councillors were left in the dark. I’ll come back to the lowered seismic design criteria in a moment, because the way this issue was manipulated by the City when it was made public in these pages is a good indicator of how the City will respond publicly to the design flaw issue. But first, let me refresh your memory about the warnings about the design that were provided by the companies in their bids for the construction contract. Two of the bid proposals rejected Ricard’s open-ring design outright as too risky in terms of cost, reliability, and repairability. The third bid, from PCL, rejected a part of Ricard’s design and altered what remained in a way that allowed PCL to meet the City’s price ceiling. But that alteration also resulted in material changes that PCL expected would reduce the life of the bridge before major repairs would be needed. PCL admitted its proposal would result in a bridge in which parts that were “subject to wear” would last only 30 years. Senior City managers kept all these warnings out of sight of elected officials. Records obtained by Focus show that at a critical in camera meeting soon after the bids were received—a moment in which councillors could have been fully apprised of the companies’ warnings before committing to Ricard’s design—City staff didn’t even mention them. In light of the design flaw discovered by Atema and its warning of the risk of metal fatigue, it now seems possible that one of those parts “subject to wear” is the entire section of the bridge built in China. LET'S GO BACK AND PICK UP THE THREAD about the project’s reduced seismic design criteria. The document mentioned above later became part of the City’s contract with PCL. Its presence in the contract protects PCL from any future legal claim from the City of Victoria in the case that the bridge suffers unrepairable damage—or is unusable by emergency vehicles—following a much smaller seismic event than that for which Meyboom had recommended the City prepare. Keep in mind that Meyboom had put the value of that additional protection at $10 million, and the City had agreed to pay for this extra protection in exchange for an implied guarantee that the bridge would stand up well in a large earthquake. That $10 million had been included in the “$77 million” estimate in 2010. That extra $10 million was meant for such features as all-steel approach bridges, which have much better seismic performance than concrete. Recall that questions about the seismic vulnerability of the existing double bridge had been the primary rationale for replacing it. Ironically, all four of its approach bridges were steel. But inclusion of the Seismic Design Criteria document in PCL’s contract meant the City had, in effect, agreed to a lower level of seismic performance, so concrete approach bridges could now be used in the new bridge. None of this was divulged to councillors when they were asked to approve a contract with PCL. When the issue was brought to light by Focus in 2015, Huggett, by then project director, provided an extensive non-denial denial that carefully avoided even acknowledging the existence of the contract document that contains the lowered seismic design criteria. For readers unfamiliar with the expression “non-denial denial”: This is a term coined by journalists to describe a response from a subject that sounds like a refutation of facts, but, on careful examination, doesn’t actually refute anything specific in the reporting and doesn’t provide any evidence that disproves the report, yet isn’t, itself, untruthful. EACH OF THE ABOVE DECEPTIONS was first divulged to the public in the pages of Focus. The City has never presented any evidence that what we have reported was inaccurate or untrue. Yet, in almost every case, some City official—often the mayor of the day—has appeared at other Victoria media outlets with vigorous non-denial denials of our reports. The City hasn’t limited its defensive tactics to traditional obfuscation, though. They’ve been ground-breakers on keeping the record opaque. When Focus filed an FOI that sought evidence that Stephens had been advised the project was already over-budget in 2011, the City employed a legal maneuver—used against a media outlet only once before in BC’s history—that allowed it to delay responding to our FOI. On the very day the City was required to provide evidence to the Office of the Information Commissioner to support its tactic, the City withdrew its claim. Such self-inflicted wounds to the City’s credibility have not been without cost. One cost of the serial deceptions has been a continuous loss of top-level City managers closely associated with the project: City Manager Gail Stephens, Director of Operations Peter Sparanese and Director of Engineering Dwayne Kalynchuk all “resigned” suddenly—or were fired. Others, too, have disappeared. As well as that huge loss of senior personnel, the serial deceptions have had a corrosive effect on the community’s trust in its civic government. Why didn’t City councillors put a halt to the repeated cycle of beating down the value of the project and concealment of their actions? The majority on council went along with the original rushed decision in 2009, and concealment of the project’s problems provided those seeking re-election in 2011 and 2014 with cover for their original error in judgment. To be fair, in many of the cases in which City staff reduced the scope of the project in significant ways just to keep Ricard’s open-ring design alive, councillors were simply not informed. In some cases, once those issues were made public, senior staff soon resigned or were fired. But getting rid of project managers didn’t have any effect on the basic underlying problem: The initial decision to proceed had been rushed, and in that rush a difficult-to-build and under-priced design had been chosen. That brings us back to the current issue of the design flaw discovered by Atema and concealed by…well we don’t know who yet, but when we do, we’ll let you know. What we will likely hear from the City now, if past behaviour is any predictor, is an adamant non-denial denial. Regardless, Victoria is now stuck with a badly degraded version of Ricard’s problematic design, and the only recourse for electors seeking accountability is to get out and vote in November’s election. UPDATE: A follow-up story has been posted here: Victoria City Hall continues cover-up of bridge design flaw (This story was edited in June 2018 to reflect information about the physical size of the plates obtained by FOI. The plates are each about two metres by two metres in size, not one metre by one metre as we originally reported.) David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

Recent scientific studies show how resident orca populations are affected by diminishing chinook runs and—critically—why the chinook are disappearing. RIVERS RUNNING INTO PUGET SOUND have perennially low returns of chinook salmon—currently estimated at just 10 percent of their historic levels—even though many of them are enhanced with hatcheries. Last year, scientific research connected this decline to secondary sewage treatment plants discharging partially-treated effluent into Puget Sound. Last June, a group of Washington scientists published a study showing the extent to which the decline in the birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population, listed as “endangered” by both the Canadian and US federal governments, is linked to the precarious state of the Salish Sea’s chinook salmon. Puget Sound chinook, which were given “threatened” status under the US Endangered Species Act in 1999, have become a cross-border issue. Recovery of both Puget Sound chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whale population would require investment of many billions of dollars by Washington State in new sewage treatment infrastructure. While taking action to protect both the orca and chinook is required by US federal law, Washington State currently has no plans to make that investment. Is our southern neighbour ignoring its responsibility to be a good environmental steward? Killer Whales can be long-lived (“Granny,” above, lived past 100), but their birth rate is dependent on chinook salmon, a threatened species in Puget Sound. (Photo: markmallesonphotography.com) LAST JUNE, A BRILLIANT SEVEN-YEAR-LONG STUDY that correlated the declining birth rate of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with falling chinook salmon numbers, mercilessly compared what’s happening to the remaining orcas to the mass starvation of the Dutch population at the hands of German Nazis during World War II. The authors stated: “The Nazis closed off the borders of Holland between October 1944 and May 1945, causing massive starvation over a 5–8 month period, with good food conditions before and after. There was a one-third decline in the expected number of births among confirmed pregnant woman during the under-nutrition period. Conceptions during the hunger period were very low. However, women who conceived during the hunger period had higher rates of abortion, premature and stillbirths, neonatal mortality and malformation. Nutrition had its greatest impact on birth weight and length for mothers experiencing hunger during their second half of gestation, when the fetus is growing most rapidly.” The inclusion of the word “Nazis” in a peer-reviewed scientific study on the reproductive dynamics of an endangered whale population may strike some as odd, but the Dutch Famine, as the above events are known, was highly unusual: it took place in a well-developed, literate population that kept excellent health records and the vast majority of those affected survived. Thus it was one of the first events in human history for which scientists had accurate, reliable records to help them understand what health impacts occur when a population of mammals is starved. The orca scientists found that a similar dynamic between food availability and birth rate has been impacting the Southern Resident Killer Whale (SRKW) population, but with one big difference: For the orca, this is not a one-time event. For them, a months-long famine now occurs almost every year. Dr Samuel Wasser, the study’s lead author, is a research professor of conservation biology at the University of Washington. Wasser’s team gathered evidence from 2008 to 2014. They found that 69 percent of detectable pregnancies in the SRKW population failed during that period. Of those failed pregnancies, the scientists found, “33 percent failed relatively late in gestation or immediately post-partum, when the cost is especially high.” That high cost included an increased risk of mortality for the would-be mother. The scientists observed: “Low availability of chinook salmon appears to be an important stressor among these fish-eating whales as well as a significant cause of late pregnancy failure, including unobserved perinatal loss.” They added: “However, release of lipophilic toxicants during fat metabolism in the nutritionally deprived animals may also provide a contributor to these cumulative effects.” In other words, not only are the orca being starved, but when a starved, pregnant orca begins burning off her fat reserves in response to the scarce supply of food, toxins bioaccumulated in her fat reserves—such as PCBs and PBDEs—begin to have more of an impact on her health, such as a reduced ability to fight infections. This could contribute to the demise of the fetus and increase the risk to the mother’s life. As a consequence of these conditions, the study found “the 31 potentially reproductive females in the SRKW population should have had 48 births between 2008–2015. Yet, only 28 births were recorded during that period. The 7 adult females in K pod have not had a birth since 2011, and just two births since 2007. The 24 females in the remaining two pods (J and L) have averaged less than 1 birth per pod since 2011, with no births in 2013, but had 7 births in 2015. One of the two offspring born in 2014 died.” As of this writing, the population has dwindled to 76 whales. As recently as 1996 there were 98 orca in the 3 pods. How did the scientists determine that 69 percent of all pregnancies failed? After all, many of the pregnancies terminated early on, and there would have been no visible signs that the females had been pregnant. How does one detect whale pregnancies? Detection dogs. Tucker, one of Wasser’s orca poop detection dogs (Photo: University of Washington) Over the seven years of the study, the scientists intermittently followed J, K and L pods through the Salish Sea and used specially-trained dogs stationed at the bow of the research vessel to sniff for orca poop, and then point out its location to the scientists. The poop was collected and later genotyped (associated with a known individual whale) and analyzed for hormone measures of pregnancy occurrence and health. The scientists also looked for chemical indicators of nutritional and disturbance stress in the poop. By making the same measurements over time, they were able to distinguish between nutritional stress caused by low availability of chinook salmon, and disturbance stress caused by the presence of nearby boats. Fisheries scientists had previously estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the SRKW population’s year-long diet consists of chinook salmon. The whales are thought to prefer chinook over other species of salmon partly because they use echolocation to find their prey. Since adult chinook are physically larger (they can weigh as much as 55 kilograms) than adults of other salmon species, chinook might be easier for orca to find. As well, there are runs of chinook returning to spawn in different river systems in the spring, summer and fall (sockeye, coho and chum return only in the fall). In the past that meant a reliable, almost year-round supply of chinook. And chinook may be preferred by the orca simply because of its higher fat content compared to other salmon. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) estimates that reliance on chinook rises to 90 percent during July and August as the resident orca target returns to the Fraser River and rivers flowing into Puget Sound. Although the link between the abundance of chinook salmon in the Salish Sea and the physical health of the southern resident population was known, Wasser’s research provides the first confirmation that low availability of chinook is suppressing the population’s birth rate and endangering the health of reproductive females. Wasser included comparison over the seven years of the study of the two main chinook runs that are keeping the southern orcas alive: the Columbia River early spring run and the Fraser River summer and fall runs. Depending on the timing of those runs, and how many fish were in them, the southern resident orca experienced more or less intense famines through the winter months and between the spring and summer runs. Estimating how many more chinook would need to be in the Salish Sea to make up for the southern orcas’ nutritional deficit wasn’t part of Wasser’s research. But in 2010, DFO estimated the nutritional requirement of the southern resident orca population, which then numbered 87, at about “1200 to 1400” chinook per day. Over the five-month period the orca occupy their critical habitat in the Salish Sea each year, that would amount to 180,000 to 210,000 chinook. Wasser’s research shows the whales weren’t catching enough chinook in 2010 and the deficit is threatening the population. Yet in the Salish Sea in 2010, the total number of chinook caught by commercial and sport fisheries, plus the number of chinook that escaped to spawn, was about 500,000 fish. (These numbers are from the US EPA and the Pacific Salmon Commission.) Of those, 320,000 returned to their natal rivers to spawn. The 180,000 fish taken by commercial and sports fishers were split roughly in half between Canada and the US, even though 94 percent of the spawning fish were headed for the Fraser River in Canada. Only 6 percent were headed for rivers in Puget Sound. Note that the total catch taken by humans is roughly equivalent to the catch required by orca. The quickest way to end the orca famine would be to end the commercial and sports fisheries for chinook in the Salish Sea, and Canadian scientist David Suzuki called for that action following the release of Wasser’s study. To recover chinook populations, however, will require a deeper understanding of why they are declining. A comparison of the Southern Resident Killer Whale population with their northern cousins helps in that understanding. Wasser noted the “significantly lower” fecundity rate of SRKW compared to the Northern Resident Killer Whale (NRKW) population. From a 2011 study by Ellis, Tower and Ford, we know that in 1974 there were 120 whales in the NRKW population; by 2011 that had risen to 262. According to Canada’s Species at Risk Registry, the population grew to 290 by 2014. DFO used this number in its 2017 reports. Above: Both NRKW and SRKW populations feed primarily on chinook, but one population of whales is growing while the other has stagnated since 1974. Data from DFO and The Center for Whale Research. Over that same period, though, the SRKW population went from 70 to a high of 98 in 1996 and then dropped to the current 76. Although both resident groups experienced a decline in population after 1996-1997 following significant declines in chinook runs, the northern population then recovered and grew steadily while the southern population has languished. As mentioned above, scientists have determined that both orca populations prey heavily on chinook as they return to spawn. It’s also known that, while their territories overlap, the northern orca rely on chinook returning to spawn in rivers north of the Salish Sea. The relative strength of the northern population compared to the southern, then, suggests the low availability of chinook that’s limiting growth of the southern orca population is a result of something that’s happening to the southern chinook that’s not happening to the northern chinook. What could that be? The most dangerous period in a chinook salmon’s life, according to fisheries scientists, is its first year. Research scientist Dr James Meador, an environmental toxicologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Fisheries) in Seattle, estimates the current first-year survival rate of Pacific Northwest ocean-type juvenile chinook salmon at 0.4 percent. That’s four-tenths of one percent. Another way of stating that is that 99.6 percent of ocean-type chinook salmon die in their first year. That year is spent in their natal river, their natal estuary and marine waters not too far from that estuary. Since this is where almost all of the mortality occurs, it follows that any substantial recovery of chinook numbers would require conditions in these areas to improve. A doubling of the current rate of survival in that first year—so that only 99.2 percent of them die—could double the number of fish that return to spawn. We’ll come back to Meador later. Wasser and his University of Washington team concluded their paper with this noteworthy comment: “Results of the SRKW study strongly suggest that recovering Fraser River and Columbia River chinook runs should be among the highest priorities for managers aiming to recover this endangered population of killer whales.” What about Puget Sound, where chinook runs are listed as “threatened”? Historically, according to Jim Myers of the Northwest Fisheries Science Centre in Seattle, the Puget Sound chinook runs were about 25 percent greater than the Fraser River’s. But in 2010, according to the US EPA and Pacific Salmon Commission, Puget Sound returns were only 6 percent of Fraser River returns. The much bigger hole in chinook numbers is in Puget Sound. Shouldn’t international attention be focussed there? Instead of accepting responsibility for the role it has played in the orca famine, Washington State has shifted public attention away from its lack of action, thereby reducing the chances of the Southern Resident Killer Whales’ survival. Now the situation is getting critical. The EPA recently downgraded the endangered whales’ survival status from “neutral” to “declining.” Time is running out. Wasser, on sabbatical, was unavailable to explain why the recovery of Puget Sound chinook stocks shouldn’t be a priority in the effort to recover the southern population of killer whales. However, an examination of two scientific studies published by Meador shed light on why Wasser and other fisheries researchers might not regard recovery of the Puget Sound runs as a likely prospect to save the orca. The decline of the Southern Resident Killer Whales may be linked to the low survival rate of juvenile Chinook salmon in contaminated Puget Sound estuaries. (Photo by Roger Tabor, US Fish and Wildlife Service) IN 2013, DR JAMES MEADOR published the study “Do chemically contaminated river estuaries in Puget Sound affect the survival rate of hatchery-reared chinook salmon?” Meador was with the Ecotoxicology and Fish Health Program at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. NFSC is a division of NOAA. In that study, Meador observed: “Ocean-type chinook salmon that rear naturally or are released from a hatchery migrate in the spring and summer to the estuary as subyearlings (age 0+) and reside there for several weeks as they adjust physiologically to seawater and increase in size and lipid content before moving offshore to marine waters… Conversely, juvenile coho salmon spend their first year in freshwater and migrate to the estuary in the spring or summer as yearlings (age 1+), generally spending only a few days in the local estuary before proceeding to more open waters. This major difference in life history can have a large effect on the degree of toxicant exposure in contaminated estuaries, which can affect fish in several ways, including impaired growth, altered behavior, higher rates of pathogenic infections, and changes to physiological homeostasis, all of which can lead to increased rates of mortality.” The physiological process of a juvenile salmon acclimatizing to saltwater is known as “smolting.” The juveniles become “smolts.” Meador examined the records from hatcheries on major rivers flowing into Puget Sound over the 36 years between 1972 and 2008. Some of the rivers had contaminated estuaries while others were considered uncontaminated. He determined the difference in the chinook smolt-to-adult return rate between rivers with contaminated estuaries and those with uncontaminated estuaries. Meador noted that the smolt-to-adult return rate is the “primary metric to assess life-cycle success.” He did the same analysis for hatchery coho in these rivers. Coho pass quickly through their natal estuaries and so would be far less impacted by contaminants in that estuary. The coho data, Meador clarified, “was used as another line of evidence to test the hypothesis that contaminated estuaries are one of the main factors determining the rate of survival for chinook.” And that’s what he found: Coho survival was not substantially impacted by contamination in their natal estuary. Meador noted that “Salmonid survival is dependent on a large number of factors, many that co-occur. The analysis presented here is simplistic, but highlights an important relationship between hatchery chinook survival and contaminated estuaries. Because this analysis examined the smolt-to-adult survival rate in fish from a large number of hatcheries and estuaries over several years in one geographical location, many of these factors were likely accounted for and therefore had less of an effect on the overall results.” As mentioned earlier, mortality in the first year of an ocean-type chinook is high. Meador described this as follows: “Survival for first-year ocean-type chinook in the Pacific Northwest has been estimated at 0.4 percent. Rates of survival over successive years are considerably higher for 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old fish at 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, and 90 percent, respectively. Clearly, first-year survival is important for chinook, and most of the mortality for first-year ocean-type chinook is attributed to predation, poor growth, pathogens, starvation, and toxicants.” Meador determined whether or not a particular estuary was “contaminated” or “clean” based on existing records of contaminants found in juvenile chinook tissue in that estuary, records of sediment contamination, and whether or not the estuary had been listed as a contaminated site. He noted that most of the data on contaminants he was able to access had focussed on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). The scientists did not make their own measurements of contaminants in the estuaries, nor did they speculate on the possible sources of such contamination. They simply compared the statistical differences in survival rates for chinook smolts between apparently contaminated estuaries and apparently uncontaminated estuaries. Meador concluded that “when all data were considered…the mean survival for juvenile chinook released from hatcheries into contaminated estuaries was 45 percent lower than for fish outmigrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” In other words, a contaminated natal estuary causes a nearly two-fold reduction in survival compared with uncontaminated estuaries. Wow. That was quite a discovery: A single factor that doubled the mortality of a threatened species of fish that was known to be the cornerstone of the diet of an endangered species of whale. Meador’s data was confined to juveniles that came from hatcheries. Does his conclusion apply to river-reared chinook? Meador’s study reported that, except for the Skagit River, Puget Sound rivers are all dominated by hatchery-bred chinook. But, for juveniles whose parents spawned in rivers, the effect of contaminants may be even greater than for hatchery-bred fish. Meador noted that “wild juvenile chinook spend approximately twice as long in the estuary as do hatchery fish, which would likely increase their exposure to harmful chemicals.” If the incidence of a contaminated natal estuary was limited to one or two of Puget Sound’s smaller rivers, this effect might not be of too great consequence. But that’s not the case. Some of the Sound’s largest river systems have contaminated estuaries. For example, the Snohomish and Puyallup rivers have the second and third largest drainage areas in the Puget Sound Basin, an indication of their potential for rearing chinook. Two forks of the Snohomish—the Skykomish and the Snoqualmie—have, according to Washington fisheries scientists, the potential for up to 84,000 spawners. But over the last four decades these rivers have been averaging only 4,500, a mere 5 percent of this river system’s potential. Meador’s research suggests this and other rivers’ collective capacity to provide nourishment for a healthy Southern Resident orca population is being cut in half, year after year, by the contamination in their estuaries. But what contamination? The Puyallup River—which once hosted one of the largest chinook salmon runs in Puget Sound—now hosts the Tacoma Central Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is permitted to discharge up to 10,000 kilograms of suspended solids per day into the river’s estuary, habitat critical to juvenile chinook. IN 2016, MEADOR PUBLISHED “Contaminants of emerging concern in a large temperate estuary” in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution. The CECs targeted in the study included a long list of pharmaceutical and personal care products, hormones, and a number of industrial compounds. Many of these substances, the authors observed, “are potent human and animal medicines.” They considered their targets to be just a “representative subset” of CECs in the environment, not a comprehensive list of what’s actually there. The scientists estimated there are over 4000 CECs leaking out into the ecosphere. Meador referenced his earlier study, noting that “juvenile chinook salmon migrating through contaminated estuaries in Puget Sound exhibited a two-fold reduction in survival compared to those migrating through uncontaminated estuaries.” His choice of targets suggests that he suspected secondary sewage treatment plants might be the source of the contamination that is causing that two-fold reduction in juvenile chinook survival. He noted that “some CECs are poorly removed by wastewater treatment plant processing or are discharged to surface waters, including streams, estuaries, or open marine waters due to secondary bypass or combined sewer overflows.” Having found no other research by other scientists along this line of investigation, Meador noted that “bioaccumulation and comparative toxicity to aquatic species constitutes the largest data gap in assessing ecological risk” posed by CECs. Meador’s team targeted 150 contaminants. They focussed on three estuaries, two considered to be contaminated and one uncontaminated. The two contaminated estuaries (Puyallup River and Sinclair Inlet) each had one or more secondary sewage treatment plants discharging treated effluent into the rivers on which they were located. The third, the Nisqually River estuary, which doesn’t have a sewage treatment plant above it, was intended as a reference—an uncontaminated estuary to establish the extent to which the other two were contaminated. The researchers took water samples from the estuaries and effluent from the treatment plants and analyzed each for the 150 target contaminants. As well, they netted juvenile chinook and Staghorn sculpin from the estuaries and whole-body tissue analyses for contaminants were performed. Eighty-one of the CEC’s were found in effluent being discharged from the treatment plants; 25 were detected in the estuaries. To the surprise of the researchers, nine (9) of the CECs were detected in the water column of the Nisqually estuary, which they had supposed was uncontaminated. Their data indicated an even more disturbing situation: “Collectively, we detected 42 compounds in whole-body fish. CECs in juvenile chinook salmon were detected at greater frequency and higher concentrations compared to Staghorn sculpin.” Finding more CECs in fish tissue than estuary water meant juvenile chinook were quickly bioaccumulating the CECs. Moreover, the chinook were absorbing a higher dose of toxins in just a few weeks than were the Staghorn sculpin, which spent their entire life in the estuary. Of the targeted contaminants, 37 were found in chinook. This included, from A to Z: Amitriptyline, Amlodipine, Amphetamine, Azithromycin, Benztropine, Bisphenol A, Caffeine, DEET, Diazepam, Diltiazem, Diltiazem desmethyl… well, you get the picture. How might multi-contaminant doses lower the survival rate of juvenile chinook? The scientists found “several compounds in water and tissue that have the potential to affect fish growth, behavior, reproduction, immune function, and antibiotic resistance,” all of which could lead to early mortality. But they also noted that even if individual contaminants weren’t at a lethal level in tissue or organs, the cumulative effect of so many different contaminants in the juvenile chinook at the same time could very well be lethal—the drug-cocktail effect that so many humans experience, sometimes with fatal results. The scientists put this finding in the context of Puget Sound as a whole: “The greater Puget Sound area contains 106 publicly-owned wastewater treatment plants that discharge at an average total flow about 1347 million litres per day (Washington Department of Ecology (2010)). Our study examined two of these with a combined total of 71 million litres per day. The output for these two wastewater treatment plants alone was on the order of kilogram quantities of detected CECs per day into estuarine waters of Puget Sound. Considering the low percentage of commercially available pharmaceutical and personal care products analyzed in this study and the amount of effluent discharged to Puget Sound waters, it is possible that a substantial load of potentially harmful chemicals are introduced into streams and nearshore marine waters daily. If the concentrations from the two studied effluents are representative of that from other wastewater treatment plants in Puget Sound, then it is reasonable to assume that inputs to streams and nearshore waters are substantial and likely on the order of 121 kilograms per day (approximately 44,000 kilograms annually) and even higher if secondary treatment bypass, permitted flows, maximum outputs, unmeasured compounds, septic system contributions, and transboundary contributions are considered.” Some of Puget Sound’s largest secondary sewage treatment plants. There are 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants in the Puget Sound Basin. Many are located on or near to the natal estuaries of threatened chinook salmon runs. All of Puget Sound is considered to be an estuarine ecosystem. The data the scientists collected contained another ominous finding. The concentrations of the targeted contaminants found in the effluent from the treatment plants were unexpectedly high, by American standards. Meador found that “a large percentage of the chemicals detected in Puget Sound effluents are among the highest concentrations reported in the US, which may be a function of per capita usage of these compounds or the treatment processes used at these wastewater treatment plants.” One final, noteworthy point: In the estuary that was thought to be uncontaminated—the mouth of the Nisqually—the researchers found 9 of the targeted contaminants in estuary water and 13 in chinook. Meador observed, “Based on our water and fish data, the Nisqually estuary was more contaminated than expected, which highlights the difficulties of establishing suitable non-polluted reference sites for these ubiquitously distributed CECs.” This observation has an interesting implication with respect to Meador’s earlier study, mentioned above, in which he was comparing the survival rates of juvenile chinook between contaminated estuaries and those considered uncontaminated. The Nisqually estuary was on the “uncontaminated” side of the ledger in that study, but on investigation it was, in reality, merely less contaminated. Would Meador’s finding of double the rate of mortality have risen if he actually had a number of pristine estuaries to compare with those that are contaminated? IN AN EARLIER STORY (“Washington’s phony sewage war with Victoria,” Focus, May 2016) we reported on the 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids permitted to be discharged by 77 of Puget Sound’s largest wastewater treatment plants each year. Attached to those solids are many contaminants, including PCBs and PBDEs, not targeted by Meador’s study, but known to have a negative impact on the health of fish and their sources of food. The additional impact on chinook smolts, after they leave their natal estuaries and migrate through this near-shore chemical soup—dubbed “Poisoned Waters” by the 2005 PBS film of that name—is hinted at by the Puget Sound Basin’s 10-fold decline in chinook returns from historic numbers. As the urbanization of Puget Sound’s shores has spread, and the daily recontamination of marine and estuarine waters has grown, the chinook and the Southern Resident Killer Whales have been pushed closer and closer toward extinction. This intense urbanization—right beside the critical habitat of both whales and their prey—is not occurring for the Northern Resident Killer Whale population, and that difference may be the deciding factor in the different birth rates of the two populations. Given the seriousness of the situation and the headlines in the media about drugged fish in Puget Sound, one might have reasonably expected that Washington State’s political leaders would respond to Meador’s findings. After all, what Everett-Seattle-Tacoma residents were flushing down their toilets into Puget Sound by way of sewage treatment plants was doubling the rate of mortality of a fish already listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. They did respond, but apparently only to deflect attention away from Puget Sound’s contamination from sewage plants. To do that they pointed at…Victoria. Just two days after an embarrassing drugged-chinook story appeared in the Seattle Times, Washington State Representative Jeff Morris boldly announced a proposal to ban Washington State employees from claiming travel expenses for trips made to Victoria until Victoria built a sewage treatment plant just like the ones around Puget Sound. A week later, Morris sent a letter to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps claiming that “chemical loading” from Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system poses a “long-term risk” to “our shared waters.” Morris’ letter was signed by 36 other Washington legislators whose districts border on Puget Sound. The legislators’ letter informed Helps: “We recognize the shared risk in short-term loss of tourism activity on both sides of the border from publicity surrounding [Victoria’s lack of secondary sewage treatment]. However, we believe the long-term damage to marine mammals, in particular, but all marine wildlife, does more long-term damage to ecotourism.” Washington State Representative Jeff Morris Morris’ idea that extinctions should be prevented because they’re bad for tourism highlights the gap between a politician’s level of understanding of this critical issue and the depth of knowledge that has been created by scientists like Wasser and Meador. If State legislators were drawing up an action plan for the recovery of Puget Sound, they could do worse than to put on their list: “Read some science about contamination.” The Washington legislators’ proposal to discourage State employees from travelling to Victoria—a move they didn’t follow through on—wasn’t the only action precipitated by Meador’s science. There was a bureaucratic response as well. The Puget Sound Partnership (PSP), which describes itself as “the State agency leading the region’s collective effort to restore and protect Puget Sound,” undertook two related “actions” after Meador’s study had been published. One of those was “Action 0156,” which directed the University of Washington to conduct an “analysis of impacts…from Victoria, BC sewage.” Nowhere to be found on PSP’s long list of actions was any analysis of the impacts from the 106 publicly-owned sewage treatment plants around the Sound that are permitted to discharge over 32.4 million kilograms of suspended solids each year. The PSP also committed to “Action 0048,” which was “Identifying sources of contaminants harmful to juvenile salmon.” PSP reports that after the expenditure of $273,000, the project is “off-schedule.” Contacted by Focus, the Washington State Department of Ecology—the agency responsible for undertaking the analysis—clarified that the study “was not actually funded.” It appears that little else on the “Action” list for the Sound’s recovery is funded, either. PSP estimated its list of “Actions” for 2016 would cost $130 million, but acknowledged that only $17 million of that had been found. Washington’s Department of Ecology confirmed that, as of 2016, the State had no plans to upgrade or relocate any of the existing large sewage treatment plants on Puget Sound. Washington State says it’s commited to the recovery of Puget Sound. That would require the State to act on its scientists’ findings about the ecological impacts of ongoing contamination from its sewage treatment facilities. Unfortunately, the State’s current course doesn’t appear likely to produce anything that the Southern Resident Killer Whales will be able to chew on. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

A shadowy group has launched complaints with the RCMP and several other public agencies. IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, Metchosin Mayor and CRD Director John Ranns, in the midst of an on-air conversation with CFAX’s Adam Stirling about the CRD’s sewage treatment project, dropped a bombshell: “There’s a group of engineers and lawyers that have put together the most remarkable chronology of events through this whole process and have filed complaints with the police. I have been interviewed by the police. They filed complaints with the ombudsman, with the society of engineers, I don’t know where that complaint has gone. Nobody wants to touch this.” Ranns later introduced me by email to the person acting as the voice of the mysterious “group of engineers and lawyers.” In exchange for a promise not to reveal Voice’s name, I was forwarded all the documents that had been sent by the group to the Victoria division of the RCMP’s Federal Serious and Organized Crime office, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC, the CRD Board Chairperson Barb Desjardins, the BC Attorney General’s office, and Ombudsperson Jay Chalke. Voice also provided me with an email exchange between RCMP Constable Erin Bajic and Voice. The documents confirmed who was behind the complaints. While Ranns had obviously been impressed by the information presented, the RCMP was blunt in its assessment. Staff Sergeant Steve Wetter of “E” Division Federal Serious and Organized Crime Section informed Voice by letter, “In thoroughly reviewing the correspondence you provided, and in speaking with witnesses you have named, our review has found no evidence of a fraud, breach of trust by a public officer, or other offence in this matter.” Read the RCMP's response to the complaint Why did Wetter come to that finding? He told Voice, “You have indicated that it is your belief, based on your research and received sewage treatment plan proposals from Pivotal, a competing company to Stantec, that the sewage treatment plan proposed by Stantec is not financially prudent to the taxpayer.” Wetter seems to be suggesting that the complaint of criminal and professional wrongdoing had actually been motivated by commercial competition between Stantec and Pivotal. The “Pivotal” Wetter referred to is Pivotal IRM, a Victoria-based company that has represented both a gasifier manufacturer and a Norwegian company that builds wastewater treatment plants. Pivotal isn’t, strictly speaking, a “competitor” to Stantec in the sense that Wetter seemed to mean. Stantec was appointed as the CRD’s treatment program management consultant. Its role was to guide the CRD toward decisions on what technology to use and the most suitable capacity of the treatment plant, sludge processing facility and conveyance systems. Stantec created the “indicative design” for a secondary treatment plant at McLoughlin Point and advised the CRD to use anaerobic digestion to reduce the sewage sludge that plant would produce. Stantec’s consultant role excluded them from being involved in any consortium of companies that would eventually bid to build the system. Pivotal, on the other hand, represented one company that wanted to play a major role in building the treatment facility, and another that wanted to supply gasifiers to burn off the sewage sludge created by the treatment process. From mid-2013 onward, Pivotal’s Chief Executive Officer Chris Corps criticized the program that Stantec had developed, both in public and in private, and promoted a distributed, multi-plant system equipped with gasifiers to burn off sewage sludge. By mid-2014, even though the contract to build a plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt had already been awarded, the CRD board was forced to consider other options after BC Minister of Environment Mary Polak declined to require Esquimalt to allow the project to proceed. Esquimalt had voiced several objections to the project, and one of Esquimalt’s appeals to Polak was that there appeared to be cheaper alternatives than the one the CRD had chosen. A grassroots organization had emerged—The Rite Plan—that promoted Corps’ vision of many small distributed plants and gasifiers. Led by Richard Atwell, The Rite Plan claimed Corps’ approach would be significantly less costly than Stantec’s McLoughlin-Hartland plan. Corps appeared to be closely involved with that group and Atwell. That could reasonably be seen as an attempt by Pivotal to use a grassroots organization to apply pressure on CRD board members to shift the project away from Stantec’s recommendations so that the technologies that Pivotal represented might be considered for the project. So while Staff Sergeant Wetter’s assessment that Pivotal was in competition with Stantec was presented in blunt terms, it wasn’t wrong. I recently asked Corps if he had instigated the complaints. In an email Corps wrote: “It’s not coming from me.” Here’s the “group of engineers and lawyers” own summary of their complaint to the RCMP, verbatim: • CRD staff have known, and been repeatedly advised, that the sewage project is over-scoped, which now calculates to at least 75 percent. Staffs are documented agreeing in writing that the project is over-scoped. Challenges by CRD Directors on the scope were overridden, even while multiple independent engineers documented the excess; • Staff failed to act on evidence from potential providers that the project could be done more cheaply. Published evidence by CRD’s own advisors illustrates the excess scope is at least $280M ($192M conveyance avoidance plus $88M savings through gasification rather than digestion); • Staff stated they did so in order to keep federal and provincial funding levels even though they knew the scope was falsely high, yet there are provisions at CRD and provincial level that require bureaucrats be fiscally prudent and minimize costs for the taxpayer - unless there is a reasonable justification to do so; • Recently, the CRD’s Project Board was appointed by the province to verify the project. Not only did they ignore what the engineers have said, but they also based their decision on the original and flawed CRD mandate to arrive at their conclusion; • The Project Board then forced acceptance on CRD, they direct-awarded and sole-sourced the project (via the original group) ignoring all standard procurement transparency and fairness practices and refusing to go out to tender, which prevented the issue from being exposed. • Because the staff and Directors were aware of the flawed calculations and potential savings, this is a Breach of the Public Trust. Now each of these claims can be refuted with evidence, but it’s not necessary. There’s an easier way to show that the overriding complaint—taxpayers are paying too much as a result of CRD staff’s wrongful actions—is at odds with reality. Consider the following: At the same time as the CRD was responding to a federal deadline for creating a land-based secondary sewage treatment system for Victoria, Metro Vancouver Regional District was doing exactly the same thing. It had been ordered by the federal government to build secondary sewage treatment for the municipalities of North Vancouver and West Vancouver by 2020. Both the project on the North Shore and the one here are now at the same stage—construction contracts have been awarded and some work has begun. Because of similarities in the timing, size and technologies used in the two projects, it’s easy to compare their relative overall cost. If, as the “group of engineers and lawyers” claim, Victoria’s project is greatly “over-scoped” and more costly than it need be, then that would be obvious in any comparison with the Lions Gate project in Vancouver. The Lions Gate project will serve an area with a residential population of about 158,000 (2016). The estimated project cost is $700 million. On a per capita basis, that’s $4430 per resident. The McLoughlin-Hartland treatment project will serve areas with a residential population of about 298,000 (2016). The estimated project cost is $765 million. On a per capita basis, that’s $2570 per resident. If Victoria’s project has been “over-scoped” by “at least 75 percent,” then Vancouver’s has been “over-scoped” by twice that percentage. Yet no one is claiming that project is too large or that there has been fraud or breach of trust in Vancouver. The contracts for both projects were won—in separate, open, competitive procurement processes—by the same consortium of companies, Harbour Resource Partners. In Victoria, the initial cost estimate and indicative design was produced by Stantec. Stantec was not involved in the Lions Gate project. Specific differences between the two projects suggest the Victoria system should, in fact, be considerably more expensive, per capita, than the Lions Gate project. For example, the Lions Gate anaerobic digester will be located right beside the wastewater treatment plant, whereas McLoughlin’s digester will be located 19 kilometres away at the end of a pipeline that is estimated will cost $90 million. As well, the Victoria project involves a costly under-the-harbour force-main tunnel. The Lions Gate project has no such tunnel or cost. If anything, the CRD has likely underestimated the required capacity of the system and underestimated construction costs. We shall see. Any responsible authority considering the “remarkable chronology of events” outlined in the complaint, in the context of the wider world of wastewater treatment construction projects, would come to the same conclusion that Staff Sergeant Wetter did: There’s no evidence of a fraud, breach of trust by a public officer, or other offence in this matter—unless it’s in Vancouver. CRD staff and most elected directors did, however, commit an act of utter foolishness. They ignored what local marine scientists and public health officials told them about the existing, already-paid-for, tidal-powered, source-controlled marine-based treatment system and instead followed orders given by senior government bureaucracies who had little knowledge of the actual environmental conditions here. Those scientists and health officials made it clear that no evidence had been provided that the approximately $800 million project would produce an environmental or public health benefit. The CRD proceeded anyway. Now that should be a crime. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

To create a realistic pathway to a low-carbon regional transportation system, science—not activism—needs to lead the way forward. IT HAD LONG BEEN MY UNDERSTANDING that cycling—all on its own—would become a significant part of the solution for reducing local transportation emissions. However, when I used the Capital Regional District’s most recent comprehensive travel survey to estimate the relative amount of work done by each form of transportation at the regional level, I was flabbergasted to find that cycling accounts for such a tiny share: 1.5 percent in 2011. The amount of work done by each transportation mode can only be compared when you consider the total distance travelled each day by CRD residents using each type of transport. Replacing the work done by fossil-fuelled automobiles is essential if we’re going to reduce emissions. But how much of that work can be replaced by humans exerting themselves by cycling or walking instead of driving? More than is currently the case in our region, no doubt. But when we consider how to shift enough of the work done by automobiles to more energy efficient modes of transportation, like walking, cycling, and transit, the magnitude of the challenge facing us becomes clear. There has to be a huge shift in how people move around, quickly. Why time is such a critical part of the equation should be obvious, and the Trudeau government’s announcement late last year of a mid-century emissions goal establishes the rate of descent for making reductions. The perplexing question is: What do we shift to? Cycling and walking are part of the solution, but there needs to be a massive shift of the work done by cars to public transit. If other places that have already made this change are any indication of what Victoria will choose to do, the role of cycling and walking will largely be for making the first short leg of a trip made by public transit. While we’re seeing local governments create isolated pockets of inordinately expensive improvements for cycling, there’s little evidence that the region is on the verge of making sensible (let alone massive) investments in public transit. I pointed this out in the last edition in “Mayor Helps’ 1.5 percent solution,” which was subtitled, “Local government’s response to reducing transportation emissions may be wishful thinking. Or foolish.” New two-way protected cycling corridor in Downtown Victoria Responding at a local level to the existential threat posed by climate change, rising sea level and ocean acidification—all caused by carbon emissions—will be a transformative, Herculean task that requires constant, difficult conversation about the path we should be on. If we Earthlings don’t do this work—including the conversations—we’re cooked. What is the task facing us? According to the CRD, 55 percent of emissions generated in the region come from fossil-fuelled vehicles. Unless there is a significant and quick decline in their use, the planet will be at increasing risk of runaway warming. We simply can’t take a long-term approach to this shift. How rapidly do we need to act? The Trudeau government’s overall emissions goal is to lower them by 80 percent (compared with 2005 levels) by 2050. As yet, no targets have been set for individual economic sectors, but it’s reasonable to assume that the transportation sector’s contribution would have to be on the order of 80 percent, give or take a few percentage points. To be on the most gradual descent that would get Canada to that goal, transportation emissions, and those from other sectors, would need to be reduced by about 34 percent over the next 12 years. Canada’s mid-century emissions target, announced in late 2016, means an overall emissions reduction of 34 percent by 2030—12 years from now. To put that time frame into perspective, consider that the City of Victoria started the process to replace the Johnson Street Bridge in 2008. It will, hopefully, open for traffic in 2018, ten years later. The amount of time left before 2030 is only a little longer than the City of Victoria needed to build a 156-metre-long bridge. What would this rapid transformation mean for drivers of fossil-fuelled cars in Victoria? Collectively, over the next 12 years, we will have to either drive 34 percent less distance each day, get new vehicles that use, on average, 34 percent less fuel, shift 34 percent of our travel to non-fossil-fuel modes of transportation, or employ a strategy that combines some or all of these. What is the CRD’s plan for responding to the goals announced by the Trudeau government in late 2016? In its already-outdated 2014 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), the CRD noted: “Long-term transportation planning efforts and investments are therefore needed to help reduce GHG emissions and adapt to a changing climate—both requirements are fundamental principles to all of the themes elaborated in this RTP. This means focusing on integrating land use and transportation planning to support sustainable transportation choices and reduce trip distances.” The CRD’s short-term plan is to double ridership on public transit by 2030 and build more cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Will this suffice to meet our national emission reduction target? The short answer is a definite “No.” I’ll show you the arithmetic for that conclusion later on. In “Mayor Helps’ 1.5 percent solution” I used the CRD’s most recent and most comprehensive survey of the region’s transportation system, done in 2011. It showed that autos accounted for 88 percent of the distance travelled in the CRD each day. By comparison, public transit accounted for 7.1 percent, walking 1.7 percent, and bicycles 1.5 percent. I questioned whether the CRD’s plan would be able to significantly shift the share of the work being done by the various modes of transportation enough to significantly reduce emissions. These numbers baffled cycling advocates, who were more familiar with “mode share” to describe cycling’s contribution to our transportation needs. Mode share is a way of comparing the number of individual trips made by each form of transportation in a day. Using mode share, both a 3-kilometre trip on a bicycle and a 10-kilometre drive in a car are given equal weight. Although the CRD’s 2011 information shows bicycling had a mode share of 2.8 percent in the region, in certain places and for certain trip purposes, such as commuting to work in the City of Victoria, cycling’s mode share can be considerably higher. The Victoria area isn’t much different from Vancouver, where cycling accounts for about 1 percent of total distance travelled. Notably, Metro Vancouver’s equivalent of the travel study done by the CRD includes such information, whereas the CRD does not. Share of total distance travelled by each mode of travel (Source: 2011 Metro Vancouver Regional Trip Diary Survey Analysis Report) Presenting basic information about the work done by components of transportation systems in this way might be discouraging to cyclists. However, when the primary consideration is reduction of emissions, “mode share” provides no useful information. As laid out in the CRD’s emissions reduction plan, the task will be to shift some fossil-fuelled auto use to a combination of transit, cycling and walking. Only by including the distance travelled, which reflects all the current realities about where people live, study, work and play and how far they have to travel each day to accomplish what they need to do, can we gauge how much energy needs to be shifted from autos to other modes. To put it as plainly as possible, a 34 percent reduction in emissions would require, after factoring in small increases in fuel efficiency and a small shift to electric vehicles, a shift of about 25 percent of the distance travelled in fossil-fuelled autos to non-fossil-fuelled modes over the next 12 years. I’ll elaborate on this later. AS MENTIONED ABOVE, my use of “total distance travelled” to compare the current energy contribution of different modes baffled cycling advocates. Former City of Victoria councillor John Luton, who has played a lead role in promoting cycling infrastructure projects in the region, wrote on Facebook, “Stories emerging from unreliable sources claim that CRD numbers show that only 1.5 percent of trips in the region are bicycle trips.” Luton went on to state, “Promoters of this theory are dishonest or unable to understand statistical information…The premise used to sell this fairy tale is that total mileage equals number of trips. That is false.…lying about the numbers is not a useful contribution to these discussions.” Edward Pullman, president of the board of directors of the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, responded to Luton: “Spot on John. By focussing exclusively on total distance travelled, folks that commute long distances become more important than those that live closer to their destinations. It’s a bizarre perversion of commuter choices.” Contacted by email, neither Luton nor Pullman could explain what their comments had meant. The story did not propose that “total mileage equals number of trips,” as Luton claimed. Former MLA and cycling advocate David Cubberley asserted: “There are no useful analytics involved in focussing on total distance travelled.” In a letter to Focus, Paul Rasmussen wrote, “Using the percentage of total miles travelled by mode… seems designed to minimize the positive impact of cycling.” The idea that our story was intentionally “designed to minimize the positive impact of cycling” occurred to other readers, as well. Transportation planning consultant Todd Litman wrote a lengthy response to our story in an online blog in which he claimed I had written that bicycle lanes were “wasteful” and “unfair to motorists.” On the basis of those claims—neither of which were made in our article, or intended—Litman continued on to assert what possessing such beliefs must indicate about the writer, including this zinger: “Critics like Broadland imply that cycling facilities only benefit a small number of serious cyclists—those who ride expensive racing bikes wearing lycra.” Nothing like that, though, was either stated or intended in our story. Luton, Pullman, Cubberley, Rasmussen and Litman are all in a position to influence the CRD’s plan for reducing emissions and the expenditure of many millions of dollars in public resources, yet none of them seemed able to understand what the CRD’s own numbers say about the magnitude of the energy shift that will be required to meet the federal target. Instead, they mounted a defense of cycling on the basis of other details we reported—or didn’t report—about the new Pandora Avenue protected bike lanes. Litman complained: “By extrapolating the Pandora bike lane cost to other Downtown arterials, Broadland estimates that Victoria’s cycling program will cost $16 million, which is almost certainly an exaggeration since the first project is always more costly than those that follow.” But the City’s record of underestimating and hiding project costs is a matter of public record. For example, when City councillors voted to replace the Johnson Street Bridge in 2009 they understood the project would cost $40 million. It’s now close to triple that. A more prudent reporter would have pushed the City’s bike lane estimate much higher. I simply extended the City’s actual cost per kilometre for the Pandora lanes—which was higher than the City’s budget estimate—to the full length of the protected corridor it plans to build. Merely reporting the likely cost of the planned Downtown protected network was, it seemed, enough to set the cycling advocates’ sense of fairness on fire. Rasmussen wrote, “Broadland criticizes the cost of the project—which he claims will be $16 million—over twice as much as the City says it will cost. In the eight years I’ve lived in Victoria, this is the first time that any entity has spent any significant amount of money on bike infrastructure. Meanwhile, just off the top of my head, I can count three significant projects for automobile traffic within the CRD in the last few years—the McTavish Interchange at $24 million, the Johnson Street Bridge project at $100 million and counting, and the McKenzie Interchange project at least $85 million. So that’s at least $210 million for car infrastructure just in major projects. Maybe even $16 million for something that promotes a clear social good isn’t so much?” Rasmussen could have included the $30-million Leigh Road Interchange (aka The Bridge to Nowhere) in Langford on that list, but let’s examine his claim a little more closely. The cost of the new McKenzie interchange, for example, includes the cost of space for cyclists, pedestrians and public transit. The new Johnson Street Bridge also includes space for those three non-car modes. In fact, 53.5 percent of the bridge’s available deck space is dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists. If the final cost of the bridge is $115 million—which it will be once hidden and as-yet undetermined costs for landscaping and additional protective fendering are included—should 53.5 percent of that cost be assigned to cycling and walking? That would be $62 million. Moreover, the public record of how this project unfolded shows that cycling advocates greatly overstated the extent to which the old bridges were being used by cyclists and their exaggerations helped to inflate the project into the public works nightmare it has become (See “Juking the stats,” Focus November 2011). Comparison of the space for autos (red) and cyclists and pedestrians (green) on the new Johnson Street Bridge (Source: PCL drawing) In Litman’s response to our story he wrote, “Cyclists just want a fair share of public resources (transportation funding and road space). What would be fair? You could argue that it should be about equal to cycling’s mode share: if 5 percent of trips are by cycling then it would be fair to invest 5 percent of public resources in cycling facilities. But this is backward looking since it reflects the travel patterns that occur under current conditions, ignoring ‘latent demand,’ the additional cycling trips that some travellers want to make but cannot due to inadequate facilities. To respond to these demands it would be fair to invest the portion of money and road space that reflects the mode share after those programs are completed; if comprehensive planning is likely to result in 10 percent cycling mode share, it would be fair to invest 10 percent of transportation funds and road space in cycling facilities.” Litman’s point isn’t particularly relevant to a discussion focussing on whether proposed bicycle and LRT infrastructure will effectively address emissions reduction, but it’s worth exploring. The record at the City of Victoria shows that transportation infrastructure decisions have been wonky, but not in the direction Litman claims. Again, consider the new Johnson Street Bridge. In the only reliable survey comparing trips across the bridge—published in a 2010 economic assessment used by the City to promote a new bridge—cycling and walking accounted for about 6 percent of mode share during periods of the year when those modes are at their peak. In the winter that share drops. Yet the new bridge will provide them with over 53 percent of the available deck space. So far there is no evidence to suggest mode share for cycling and walking will ever reach 53 percent, but they got it anyway. The City of Victoria Engineering Department's traffic counts on the Johnson Street Bridge used in a 2010 economic impact analysis to support a new bridge: Autos on left, buses centre, bicycles on right. Reading the various responses to our story, I got the strong impression that cyclists were not willing to consider the story’s core idea: Transportation infrastructure decisions need to more strongly reflect the urgent need to reduce transportation emissions, and we need better, more timely information on vehicle use in the CRD in order to gauge the effectiveness of the strategies that are being employed to reduce emissions. By “better” I mean more trustworthy information, the gathering of which is insulated from the influence of special interest groups like the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition, engineering and project management corporations, or current and former politicians. In email exchanges with Litman and others, it emerged that, in their minds, Focus had written the wrong story. The cycling advocates were furious that our article focussed so narrowly on the issue of emissions reduction rather than fully explaining all the other benefits that more cycling infrastructure would bring, such as cleaner air, greater personal safety for cyclists and a reduction in vehicle congestion. Litman wrote, “Public investments should be evaluated based on total benefits and costs. My report, ‘Evaluating Active Transportation Benefits and Costs’ (vtpi.org/nmt-tdm.pdf ) provides a framework for doing just that: it identifies about a dozen categories of impacts (benefits and costs) that should be considered when evaluating walking and cycling policies and programs, including direct impacts on users, and indirect impacts on society. Your column only considered two benefits: increased user safety and climate change emission reductions. That is grossly incomplete and undervalues cycling improvements.” Our story, in fact, made no attempt to examine “increased user safety” beyond presenting Mayor Helps’ publicly stated position. Nor was it our purpose to present any of cycling’s other benefits. Our focus was on emissions reduction and getting better information. Litman encourages us to evaluate cycling infrastructure on the basis of total benefits and cost, but this would be an exceedingly speculative endeavour. Consider cost. The 2011 CRD Pedestrian and Cycling Master Plan—the only plan for building cycling infrastructure in the member municipalities of the CRD—estimated the cost of a region-wide bicycle network at $275 million. But that plan didn’t include any cycling improvements on Pandora Street. Yet it’s still the “Master Plan.” Indeed, the plan estimated costs of $3.3 million for 22.7 kilometres of “priority” bike lanes in the City of Victoria. But that’s a lower cost than the actual cost incurred for only 1.4 kilometres of protected bike lanes on Pandora (which wasn’t in the plan). And, optimistically, the plan estimates the cost of “all projects” (54.7 kilometres) in the City of Victoria at $12.4 million. Yet that won’t even cover the four legs of the 5.3-kilometre-long protected network in the Downtown core. The plan’s estimates for other municipalities seem even wilder, if that’s possible. For example, it put the cost of 26.5 kilometres of bikeway in View Royal at $36 million. Why would $36 million be spent way out in View Royal and only $12.4 million in Victoria? By the way, the consultant who wrote the CRD’s Master Plan lived in Oregon. Even if we did have a good grasp of the benefits an advanced cycling network might provide, the cost estimating that has been done so far is deeply flawed. So how can a useful cost-benefit analysis be conducted? Again, the CRD needs more trustworthy information gathered by a process that’s insulated from special interest groups. In any case, cyclist-centric claims about mode share, costs and fairness—and the backlash from other parts of the community those claims generate—are diversions for which we no longer have time. Shouldn’t the choice about how to transform our transportation system be simpler than that? Shouldn’t it be: Are we going to make a serious attempt to meet the federal emissions target or not? If we are, what do we need to do to accomplish that? Personally, I’m not interested in writing about all the benefits of a “sustainable” transportation system if that system won’t come anywhere close to meeting our 2030 emissions reduction target. So here’s the crux of the problem: The emissions reduction potential of an improved cycling network, if that’s all that’s executed, is limited. A paper published by Litman quoted results from “a detailed study of five US communities with active transport improvements” which found the improvements resulted in a reduction of “one to four percent of total automobile travel.” A “one to four percent” reduction would be the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs as the ship is sinking. We need a 34 percent reduction in 12 years. Let’s shift back to what our regional transportation system would need to look like by 2030 so that we could meet that target. To get a clearer picture, let’s start in the Netherlands. The Netherlands has invested billions of dollars in public transit and infrastructure for bicycles and pedestrians. Is this a solution for Victoria? STATISTICS NETHERLANDS REPORTS that, in 2015, with 1.1 bicycle for each of its nearly 17 million inhabitants, that country had “the highest bicycle density in the world.” Featured prominently in its depiction of that country’s transportation system is a chart showing the percentage that each different mode contributed to transportation of people on land—bicycles, cars, buses, trains, walking, etcetera. Percentage of what? The percentage of the total distance travelled: Domestic distance travelled by transport mode in the Netherlands (Source: Statistics Netherlands) According to Statistics Netherlands, cars accounted for 73 percent of the total distance people travelled within their country. Public transit provides 12 percent, bicycles 7 percent and walking 3 percent. The City of Amsterdam, considered to have the greatest regional participation in cycling of any large European city, also publishes comparisons of the extent to which each transportation mode is used within that city, both by mode share and total distance travelled: Mode share (left) and share of total distance travelled (right) in the City of Amsterdam (Source: City of Amsterdam) The combined mode share for cycling and walking amounts to 54 percent (30 + 24). Yet when the total-distance-travelled lens is applied, together they account for 14 percent (12 + 2). The Dutch, rightfully proud of their extensive use of bicycles for transportation, have no problem being transparent about how much of the work of transporting people is done by each mode. Cars, at 54 percent, still account for the majority of the work done. (According to TomTom, an Amsterdam-based company that measures vehicle congestion all over the globe, Amsterdam’s traffic congestion is increasing; it’s already at a level higher than many American cities.) In the CRD, 88 percent of that work is being done by cars. The 34 percentage points of difference between Victoria’s and Amsterdam’s reliance on fossil-fuelled cars to transport people is, completely coincidentally, equal to the shift Victoria would need to make by 2030 to be on a path that would meet the federal mid-century goal. In other words, Victoria would need to become Little Amsterdam (Amsterdam has a metropolitan population of 1.6 million, Victoria’s is 368,000) within 12 years—the equivalent of a moonshot. Amsterdam’s achievements, it should be noted, include extensive bus, tram, metro and railway networks which provide the means to extend the length of a trip that a person starts and ends as a pedestrian or a cyclist. This achievement has taken many decades and many billions of dollars. For example, the city’s 73 kilometres of underground metro lines have a current value of $30-40 billion. Amsterdam’s highly developed public tramway, metro and railway system. Bus routes aren’t shown. Estimated cost? Unknown, but the 9.5-kilometre North-South Line (shown by the blue line), a new metro line currently under construction, will cost the equivalent of $4.6 billion CAD. What would Victoria need to do to knock 34 percent off its emissions tally? Let me take you through that exercise, but keep in mind that this is an arithmetical exercise performed only to provide you with a sense of the magnitude of the challenge we face. To do it we need to start with some basic assumptions. First, let’s assume 4 percent of fossil-fuelled auto travel in the CRD shifts to electric cars over the next 12 years (it’s currently less than 1 percent). That would take care of 4 percent of transportation emissions and our reduction requirement would fall to about 30 percent. If there’s a quick breakthrough in super-capacitor technology, which could replace the lithium ion batteries currently used in electric vehicles, this shift could eventually be much higher. But even such an unexpected breakthrough wouldn’t have a big impact over the next 12 years. Secondly, let’s assume there will be only minor emission reductions as a result of people using cars with higher fuel efficiency. In the USA earlier this year, Trump ordered a review of Obama’s regulations requiring much greater fuel efficiency by 2025. There’s broad expectation in the US that those standards will be rolled back, partly because car manufacturers have made the case that Obama’s regulations can’t be met without making cars unaffordable. Canada harmonizes with the US on such matters, so higher fuel efficiency seems like a long shot. Still, let’s include a conservative five percent reduction in car emissions due to fuel efficiency gains by 2030. Now we’re down to the need for a 25 percent reduction from taking other actions. Most people are aware of the need to reduce emissions and believe they already limit their travel to only what’s essential. That leaves government only one option: somehow persuading drivers to replace 25 percent of their current auto travel with a combination of public transit, bicycling or walking. How will we be persuaded? There would be no need for a carbon tax if people would voluntarily limit their auto use to the level governments told them was necessary. But we’re not like that, so implementation of a much higher carbon tax to start pushing the most cost-sensitive drivers out of their cars would have to occur soon. The Province’s account of BC’s emissions shows the current level of the carbon tax doesn’t appear to be having much bite, especially with gas prices as low as they are. So our last assumption is that much more serious fuel-cost persuasion will begin soon. With current total travel by autos in the CRD running at approximately five million kilometres each day, 25 percent of that—or 1.25 million kilometres per day—would need to be shifted from cars to buses, walking and cycling. However, in reducing the distance driven by autos by 25 percent, we would also likely displace 25 percent of the 1 million kilometres travelled in autos by passengers each day. So the shift to public transit, walking or bicycles would need to amount to about 1.5 million kilometres per day. Doubling the mode share of buses by 2030—the CRD’s stated goal—would cover about 500,000 kilometres of the required shift. The remaining 1 million kilometres of the shift would fall to walking and cycling. When added to their current levels, that would mean that cycling and walking would account for about 1.2 million kilometres each day, or about 18 percent of the total distance travelled—in just 12 years time. Now compare that with Amsterdam. Its combined total for bicycles and walking is 14 percent of the total distance travelled—a level that has taken several decades and billions of dollars invested in infrastructure for walking, bicycles, buses, subways, trams and commuter rail. Moreover, Amsterdam has packed 1.6 million people into an area about the same size as Victoria’s metropolitan area. That high population density, over four times Victoria’s, is essential for the financial viability of Amsterdam’s expansive, complex and costly public transit system. For the CRD’s vaguely-outlined plan to work, the distance travelled by cycling and walking would have to increase by about 600 percent (over levels in 2011) within 12 years. For a City with a steadily aging population and a so-so transit system, is this realistic? Has the CRD come up with the moonshot plan that will reduce the region’s transportation emissions by 34 percent within 12 years? So far, only minimal information has emerged into public view about how the region’s public transit system will evolve so its mode share doubles by 2030. What seems evident is that the rationale stated in the CRD’s Regional Transportation Plan for very expensive rapid transit is much more of a response to brief periods of traffic congestion—along the Trans Canada Highway out to Langford, and the Pat Bay Highway out to Sidney, during peak commuting periods—than it is a response to the need to cost-effectively reduce emissions throughout the day. The assumption that such congestion will continue on the Trans Canada, even after the new McKenzie Road interchange is complete, is founded on the debunked theory that most future growth in the region will occur in Langford. The 2016 census data shows that over the past 15 years—Langford’s glory years—the Core’s share of the metropolitan population has hardly changed, dropping from 68 percent to 65 percent. That strongly suggests the best place to focus future investment in public transit is where most of the people already live—in Victoria and Saanich. Instead, the CRD could be the first government in history to plan for an LRT to Nowhere. After the next 12 years, of course, the same rate of shift from autos to public transit, cycling and walking would have to continue—right through to 2050. Keep in mind, too, that transportation emissions in Canada amount to about 24 percent of total emissions, so to be on the most gradually descending path to 2050, all the other sectors would need to be reducing their emissions as well. That will impact all of our lives in ways that, at this point, we haven’t yet imagined. But unless we do it—according to the world’s best scientific minds—we’re cooked. Is Victoria’s political culture up to the task of getting us through this daunting challenge? The short answer may lie in the record of the attempt to build a new Johnson Street Bridge. An even more chilling possibility is hinted at by the misplaced effort to convert Victoria’s safe, source-controlled, low-cost, tidal-powered marine-based sewage treatment system to a land-based system that will cost Victorians billions of dollars over the life of the infrastructure that’s being built. According to DFO scientists, land-based sewage treatment will have negligible effect on environmental conditions in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The existing marine-based system was endorsed by an overwhelming number of Victoria’s marine scientists and current and former public health officials. One of the DFO scientists I spoke with during those deliberations was Sophie Johannessen, the lead author of the peer-reviewed study that found land-based treatment would have a negligible environmental effect on environmental conditions in the Strait. I asked Johannessen if there was anything the community could do that would have a more positive effect on marine ecosystems than moving Victoria’s marine-based sewage treatment system onto land. “I think so, yes,” Johannessen said. “We could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, enact source control for persistent contaminants, and reduce other local pressures on the marine biota.” The local political culture didn’t listen to the scientists. Instead it followed Mr Floatie to Seattle and started the never-ending process of flushing billions of dollars down our toilets. On atmospheric emissions, the scientists have spoken loudly and clearly: there’s a pressing need to act. In response, will our politicians be led by special interest groups? Or will their decisions be based on science and evidence? David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

Local government’s response to reducing transportation emissions may be wishful thinking. Or foolish. IS THE CITY OF VICTORIA’S STRATEGY to create protected bike lanes in the Downtown core a well-thought-out strategy to make bicycling safer, relieve vehicle congestion and move Victoria in the direction of a low-carbon future? Or is it another case—like the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project—of the City unintentionally displaying its proven tendency toward decision-based evidence-making? The first component of the strategy—a $3.5-million, 1.2-kilometre-long corridor on Pandora between Cook and Store—became operational in May. By mid-June the City’s PR team announced “the number of cyclists using the new bike lanes is very encouraging” with “nearly 40,000 bicycle trips” made along the corridor in its first month of operation. That timeframe, and the numbers, included Victoria’s Bike to Work Week, an annual outpouring of temporary enthusiasm. A second protected bicycle corridor—1.2 kilometres of Fort from Cook to Wharf—was approved by City of Victoria councillors on June 8. Construction is scheduled to begin in September. The City plans to expand these corridors to Wharf, Humboldt and Cook. At the cost per kilometre of the Pandora corridor, the 5.3-kilometre-long Phase 1 would cost about $16 million—and depends almost entirely on the availability of grants from the Gas Tax Fund. The rationale behind the protected lanes—as opposed to cyclists sharing the existing infrastructure with automobiles—is to increase the safety of cyclists. But creating protected lanes has resulted in removal of auto parking space, already in short supply in the Downtown core much of each day. The Pandora corridor removed 43 auto parking stalls; another 30 will be removed on Fort Street. At that rate of parking space removal, Phase 1 would see about 175 spaces disappear. Before construction of the protected corridors began, the City had less than 2000 on-street parking spaces Downtown. So Phase 1, originally planned to be complete by the end of 2018, will see the loss of nearly 10 percent of on-street parking in the Downtown core. The City’s aim appears to be to quickly replace a significant fraction of motorized individual transport with unmotorized individual transport. For people who drive a car, truck or van Downtown and don’t see themselves as likely to ever switch to a bicycle, the new situation feels like an attempt to force them to make a change they can’t or don’t want to make, and carries a whiff of social engineering. Some Downtown businesses have expressed concern that making vehicle parking Downtown less available will discourage potential clients and impact their businesses. But Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps has argued that protected bicycle corridors will make auto parking more available, not less. Her theory is that by making biking around Downtown safer, people who in the past would only travel there by auto will now be encouraged to come by bicycle. Victoria’s 40-ish mayor is an avid cycle commuter and she now has a protected corridor that runs most of the 1.4 kilometres from her home in Fernwood to her place of work at City Hall. Implicit in the City’s decision to proceed along this course is the belief that the number of cyclists, especially those commuting to work, needs to be encouraged and allowed to grow far beyond current levels. Why are they doing that? Here’s the City’s official position on “why”: “Encouraging cycling, along with walking and transit use, is an important strategy to manage expected population growth and support community health, affordability, economic development, air quality and climate action objectives. As the City grows in population, we will need to shift some of our trips to transit, cycling and walking because these are much more efficient modes of transportation than single occupancy vehicles.” The City supports its position with data that it attributes to the 2011 Census that indicated 10.6 percent of people living within the City of Victoria cycle to work. That’s Canada’s highest per capita incidence of commuting by bicycle. It’s hard to argue with federal census data that counts (almost) every single person in the country and has a margin of error close to zero. The City is hoping to build on that encouraging number and calls its plan “Biketoria.” While the City’s vision sounds progressive and smart, the best available data about transportation in Victoria calls into question the City’s emphasis on cycling and walking—and perhaps transit, too. Let’s start with Victoria’s claim to fame, that 10.6 percent of Victorians who cycle to work. It turns out that number wasn’t obtained directly from the 2011 Census. Instead, the “10.6 percent” figure comes from the 2011 National Household Survey, which was voluntary and produced data with a margin of error much higher than zero. Since good transportation planning requires good transportation data, it’s important to understand why one of the fundamental numbers supporting the City’s Biketoria initiative is probably flawed. The National Household Survey asked participants only one question about transportation: How did the person filling out the survey “usually get to work.” There were 11 modes of transportation listed (auto driver, auto passenger, transit, walking, bicycle, etc...) and the respondent could choose only one. How did multi-modal commuters decide how to respond? We don’t know, but it’s well-known that commuter cycling ebbs in the darker, colder, wetter half of the year, so it’s reasonable to assume that some cyclists must be using other forms of transportation to get to work at least part of the year: walking, transit, some might even drive an auto. But the National Household Survey didn’t allow for such complexity. Nor did it attempt to gauge the distance people had to travel to work. As a guide for transportation planners, then, the National Housing Survey doesn’t really qualify as a reliable tool for making multi-million-dollar transportation decisions. Yet it is attributed as one of the primary sources upon which the City based its case for building protected bicycle corridors. The other source the City cites is the 2011 CRD Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey. But a careful read of the data in that survey, especially when compared with the data the survey produced in 2006, raises questions about the City’s direction. According to the CRD’s 2011 survey, only 3.8 percent of trips within, into and out of the City of Victoria over a 24-hour period were made by bicycle. When the average distance of trips made by different modes of transportation are factored in, bicycles accounted for less than 2.5 percent of the total distance travelled using all modes. Moreover, the Origin-Destination survey didn’t capture trips that were made to move goods or to provide services—like taxi drivers, social workers, delivery services, healthcare providers, transit drivers—it’s a long list and almost none of it is done by bicycle. If bicycles currently account for only a tiny fraction of the total distance travelled each day in the City of Victoria, how realistic is it that large numbers of Victorians will soon become cyclists? While Copenhagen’s large contingent of cyclists is held up as a model for Victoria to aspire to, the average age of a person living in Copenhagen is 35.9 years and has been falling for many years. In the City of Victoria, the average is 44.5 and is projected to rise for many years. As people get older, they generally spend a lot less time on bicycles, especially in hilly places like Victoria. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Origin-Destination surveys for 2006 and 2011 show that, for the whole CRD, the daily mode share for bicycles dropped slightly over those five years, from 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent. Yet the official goal in the CRD is to raise that to a regional level of 15 percent by 2038. Is this realistic? The answer to that becomes clearer when we consider the cumulative distance travelled each day by residents of the Capital Regional District (see table below). According to data in the 2011 Origin-Destination survey, about 6.6 million kilometres are travelled within the CRD each and every weekday (note that’s each day, not week). Of that travel, 72.7 percent was as the driver of an auto and 15.6 percent as a passenger in an auto. That means that about 88 percent of all travel within the CRD relies on autos. Share, by transportation mode, of total distance travelled within the CRD on a weekday Source: 2011 CRD Origin-Destination Household Travel Survey, conducted by Malatest and Associates Ltd. The survey did not capture commercial traffic or traffic originating outside of the CRD. The 2011 survey is the most recent data available. Only 1.5 percent of the distance travelled is by bicycle. As noted above, the survey does not capture commercial trips made to move goods or to provide services. If commercial traffic was included, bicycles would likely drop to little more than one percent. So bicycles currently account for a tiny fraction of the actual distance people cover in getting from point A to point B in the CRD. Again, is it realistic to think that bicycles—currently providing about 1 percent of the work being done by our regional transportation system—will supply 15 to 20 times as much work in 20 years? Without improving the cycling network, City and CRD transportation planners won't know whether their long-term goal is achievable. Unfortunately, though, as they experiment, the protected lanes may unintentionally increase emissions by delaying vehicles making right-hand turns off Pandora, resulting in hours of additional engine idling each day (see the short video below). Unless use of the corridor increases dramatically, it could be argued it's doing more harm than good most of the day. The Pandora Avenue protected bicycle corridor includes new traffic signals that delay right-hand turns off Pandora by 25 seconds at each of six intersections. As is shown in this video, this will increase emissions from autos even though there are few cyclists using the lane. You might be wondering why I am quoting a study done in 2011. The Origin-Destination surveys are done every five years, but the 2016 survey has been delayed. John Hicks, senior transportation planner at the CRD, told Focus the 2016 version, which would normally have been released about now, was pushed back a year so that 2016 federal census data could be used more directly in determining required sample sizes. A call for credentials was issued by the CRD in April and the survey will be conducted during the same months as the 2011 survey. It should be released in March 2018. So, for now, we are dependent on the 2011 data, and that shows bicycles only provide a tiny fraction of the travel needs of people throughout the CRD. Regardless of whether the loss of nearly 10 percent of the Downtown core’s on-street parking is or isn’t a reasonable trade-off for a greater level of safety for bicyclists, the claim that these corridors will play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions seems like a refusal to accept the obvious: Most people prefer to use four-wheeled motorized personal transport. So at least some of the CRD’s and the municipalities’ efforts in transportation planning ought to include how that strong preference can be incorporated in a transportation system that evolves toward a low-carbon future. For example, why not incorporate charging stations for electric cars into the protected bicycle corridor infrastructure? Providing electricity for free would create an incentive for electric vehicles Downtown. Even so, such ideas would be little more than civic acknowledgment of the need to reduce emissions since the vast majority of motorized vehicles depend on fossil fuels and likely will for many years to come, according to auto industry experts. To produce a significant reduction in CRD transportation emissions, a more sophisticated approach than painting bicycle lanes on roads will be needed. That will, at least to begin with, require helping auto drivers and auto passengers reduce their use of fossil-fueled vehicles, while accepting their choice for how to get around. How can that use be downsized? The data the CRD has collected, if it’s accurate, contains some interesting possibilities. Comparing the 2006 and 2011 surveys, it appears two shifts in the use of autos were underway. One was good news, the other bad. First the bad news. According to the CRD’s Origin-Destination surveys, between 2006 and 2011, about 78,000 fewer trips were taken as auto passengers each day. Where did the passengers go? It appears that many of them might have become drivers. In 2006, drivers accounted for 59 percent of non-commercial trips. But by 2011 that had climbed to 64 percent. If nothing else had changed, this would have meant more vehicles travelling each day—and higher emissions. But—and this is the good news—regional transportation emissions per person may have declined in spite of the trend of passengers becoming drivers. That’s because the average number of daily trips per person in the CRD decreased after 2006 by 4.8 percent. That translates to CRD residents driving about 43,000 fewer kilometres each weekday than in 2006. These two factors—the incidence of single-occupancy vehicles and the average number of daily trips taken by CRD auto users—suggest possibilities for emissions reduction that don’t involve converting car drivers to cyclists. (Again, this is only true to the extent that the data collected for the Origin-Destination surveys for 2006 and 2011 is accurate.) The CRD needs to gather more data that provides decision-makers, elected officials and media answers to basic questions, such as: Why did CRD residents reduce the number of their trips between 2006 and 2011? Is there some way to incentivize that shift in behaviour? If the City of Victoria can spend $16 million on safer bicycling for a few thousand bicyclists—using money collected from auto drivers through the Gas Tax Fund—why can’t the CRD refund a few million a year back to auto drivers who can prove a significant reduction in the miles they travel each year or switched to an EV? And what were the factors that turned auto passengers into auto drivers? What would it take to reverse that trend? Can local government, especially the CRD, play a role in facilitating that reversal? With the huge growth in the use of cell phones, ipads and apps, why does the CRD not have its own high-profile regional rideshare system in place that can connect car drivers who are about to make a similar trip? The absence of timely, deep, reliable data on transportation in the CRD will make it difficult for the community to make sensible decisions based on evidence. One example of how badly politicians can steer the public interest—when they make a decision and then look for evidence that supports it—is the CRD’s controversial LRT initiative. That began in 2009 as the provincial NDP’s response to the then-Campbell government’s transit initiatives in Vancouver. Local NDP MLA Maureen Karaganis stated back then: “The Campbell government’s transit plan focuses almost entirely on projects in the lower mainland while the rest of BC, including Victoria, has been ignored. The Capital Region seeks to avoid sprawl by building an innovative, high quality public transit system with LRT between Downtown and the western communities.” By 2012, that we-want-one-too logic had ballooned into a live, billion-dollar proposal to build an LRT between “Downtown and the western communities.” Note that the western terminus of such a system wouldn’t have been the “western communities,” but rather Langford. When politicians start pounding the drum for some large infrastructure project, which they hope will distinguish themselves from their political competitors, the only thing that might prevent them from making a big, expensive mistake is credible, accurate, up-to-date information. With the LRT proposal, if a billion was going to be spent anywhere, should it really be used to connect Downtown with Langford? The 2011 Origin-Destination survey included a graphic of the “Desire Lines” in the CRD (see graphic below). These represent the most heavily-travelled routes people take in moving around the CRD each day. In the illustration, you can see that, by far, the strongest flows are between Downtown and south Victoria, from Downtown to Uptown, and from all three of those areas out to the University of Victoria. Notice the feeble desire line out to Langford. Desire Lines in the CRD, from the 2011 Origin Destination survey. The illustration excludes trips that originate outside of the CRD. For example, trips from anywhere north of Langford, which contribute much of the traffic on the at-times congested Trans Canada Highway. The LRT the NDP was proposing would likely not be used by such travellers. The most prominent desire lines show where an LRT should be located if the goal was to reduce emissions and create a more compact community. A 19-kilometre-long loop that connected Downtown, Oak Bay, the Shelbourne Valley, UVic and Uptown would follow arterial roads that already pass within a kilometre or so of tens of thousands of existing homes. Over time, the presence of a transit line would encourage even greater population density in those already-developed areas. According to the desire lines, a 15-kilometre (one way) route from Downtown to Langford wouldn’t make sense. Yet the Regional Transportation Plan’s rationale for LRT sees that route “as a possible means to significantly curb pressure on auto infrastructure in high growth areas.” By “high growth area” the CRD means Langford, which has the highest relative population growth rate in the CRD. But in terms of absolute growth—which includes growth in population, commercial and institutional development and employment—the area of Victoria and Saanich already heavily criss-crossed by desire lines is experiencing more than twice the growth of Langford. With the NDP about to become government, will an LRT to Langford be resurrected? Quick! Using Google Earth, someone needs to count all the dwellings and places of employment within walking distance of the above two routes. Why isn’t that information already available? Choosing the wrong first route for LRT would have a devastating effect on the long-term prospects of reducing emissions in the CRD. What the CRD really needs, before spending countless millions on pet transportation projects that address a tiny fraction of the CRD’s emissions problem, is credible and comprehensive information about what it would take to get people who live here (as opposed to Danish twenty-year-olds) to change their travel behaviour. Obtaining that information would cost money, of course. One way to fund such data gathering would be to use the Gas Tax Fund. Unfortunately, that huge chunk of cash—which is taken from drivers of vehicles that run on fossil fuels—is used almost exclusively for cycling infrastructure or non-transportation-related projects in the CRD: an agricultural strategy here, a tennis court there, water system upgrades all over the place, even a fire hydrant in Shirley. The tax isn’t being used, however, for any initiative that might one day seriously lower carbon emissions. Perhaps that’s because actually reducing the use of fossil-fuelled vehicles would diminish the flow of money to the Gas Tax Fund, and that, in turn, would start to dry up funding for local politicians’ pet projects. It’s an interesting dynamic, one addiction feeding another. How do we get free of it? Please let me know what you would do. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. An earlier version of this story implied that the CRD's 2038 goal for cycling's regional mode share was 25 percent. Its actual goal is 15 percent. The goal is for 25 percent in "urban areas." 2012 CRD bike counts.pdf

To not be misled by experts into making bad decisions, elected officials need to ask hard questions. Voters need to elect prosecutors, not patsies. IN MID-JUNE, City of Victoria councillors were given another update on the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project by Project Director Jonathan Huggett. They learned the project was experiencing new technical problems and were given yet another date at which completion might occur. Yes, that sounds just like the last update, the one before that and the one before that. But the real purpose of Huggett’s report was to show the City was including “lessons learned” from the bridge project into its next foray into fiasco avoidance. He delivered to councillors a report on fumbles made during that project which, hopefully, could be avoided if council’s decision to replace the Crystal Pool at a cost of $70 million goes forward. I’m going to focus on a single lesson learned that Huggett unintentionally highlighted: the tendency of some current councillors, in their meetings with costly experts like Huggett, to ask questions or make observations that have little or no meaning or value, thus inviting meaningless advice from those experts—like Huggett. Why do Victoria councillors ask so many dumb questions of experts? Who really knows? But the impact of not being up to sniffing out inaccuracy, underestimation, and overselling inevitably leads to millions of extra dollars of cost—and some hidden liabilities that one day may thrust themselves into the faces of local taxpayers. Aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. At a critical moment in this project, did elected officials ask dumb questions instead of grilling engineers? Following Huggett’s report, in which he laid the responsibility for everything that had gone wrong with the project on unnamed persons who were no longer sitting in the room, councillors spoke. Councillor Pam Madoff, who has been sitting in the room from the very beginning, expressed her view that she had done her due diligence on the project and, repeatedly, asked “how far” councillors had to go in their public oversight role in such projects. Here’s an excerpt of what she said: “I remember very specifically having this conversation [with the bridge’s designers and engineers] about the mechanics, you know, the—in simplistic terms—the cogs, the wheels, how it was going to lift. I remember at the time saying, ‘Is this basically just a larger version of the Meccano sets that we played with as kids, in terms of its actual mechanical operation?’ And, again, that was the assurance. To me it comes down to: how far does one have to go? We felt like we asked the right questions at the time. It turns out they may not have been the right answers.” If an elected official asks a professional engineer if a bridge is like a Meccano set, what should happen? Does the engineer say something along the lines of: “Well, you know, Councillor Madoff, a bridge is nothing like the Meccano sets you played with as a child. I’m worried about your question because it seems to indicate you have little understanding about what we’re considering doing here. I think we ought to postpone the rest of this meeting while you—and perhaps some of the other councillors—go back to your rooms and think harder about what your responsibilities are in this situation, and what questions you should be asking. People’s lives, scant public resources, the City’s reputation—all these could be put in serious jeopardy if you fail to provide adequate oversight of the public interest on this project. Is a bridge like a Meccano set? Well that’s the dumbest question I’ve ever been asked.” Huggett, of course, didn’t respond so impolitely. Instead, he said: “There is no question that you were not given good advice.” In much the same manner that previous experts had politely given City councillors bad advice, Huggett had just done the same thing. When you are collecting $20,000 a month for writing report after report about why the new bridge is still stuck in China—as Huggett has been doing since 2015—you obviously don’t bite the hands of those who are nervously signing your cheques. But Madoff’s unanswerable question about whether this bridge was like a Meccano set allowed Huggett to pile bad advice on top of older bad advice and yet appear to be sympathetic and sage. Later, Councillor Ben Isitt—who I hasten to point out does not ask dumb questions—provided the meeting with his own list of lessons learned. One of those was about the “lack of public oversight by council.” He recalled an attempt by the City “to quash investigative journalism into this project.” Isitt reminded his fellow councillors that “in the autumn of 2012, just as we got reports that there were three bidders, only one of which was within the City’s affordability ceiling, the City attempted to quash attempts by Focus Magazine to file FOIs on this project.” (The City was supported in that effort by current councillors Madoff, Charlayne Thornton-Joe, Chris Coleman and Marianne Alto.) Isitt told the meeting the incident showed “the need for public oversight of council and the City administration.” Councillor Jeremy Lovejoy picked up on Isitt’s point and asked Huggett, “Do you see lessons learned in terms of public communications on the project?” Perhaps feeling uncomfortable by Isitt’s promotion of the virtues of Focus’ reporting on the project (Huggett has refused to answer any questions from this magazine over a 3-year period), Huggett responded to Loveday’s vague question by referring to “a long, semi-public debate about seismic design. It becomes extremely difficult to have a meaningful debate in the public arena about something as complex as the seismic design of a bascule bridge. I understand that it is legitimate…freedom of the press to raise these issues. But it’s a very difficult issue to debate. It’s highly specialized and, you know, I don’t think you would appreciate it if I told you I’d spent last week debating with a journalist about seismic design.” Huggett didn’t actually answer Loveday’s question. The question’s vagueness allowed Huggett to provide, instead, excuses for why he never provided City council and the public with an explanation of why there is a rider in the bridge’s construction contract that will limit the liability of those involved in the project if the bridge fails to perform to expectations. To explain that rider would have been “extremely difficult,” “complex,” and would have taken a week of “debating with a journalist,” which, at the rate he is billing City taxpayers, would have meant a cost of $5000. This could have been Loveday’s moment to shine a light on a critical issue of public safety and the City’s legal liability. Focus first raised questions about the contract rider back in March 2015 after obtaining the document—Johnson Street Bridge Seismic Design Criteria—through an FOI. The document was secretly introduced into the project’s procurement proceedings in August 2012. The document stipulated much lower levels of expected seismic performance than had been recommended to the City by engineers. The City had earlier agreed to pay an extra $10 million for the recommended level of protection. Attached to the construction contract, the document would provide proof that the City had accepted this low level of seismic performance if the situation ever arose that the bridge was badly damaged, or people were killed on it, as the result of a large earthquake. The rider put all the risk back on the City’s plate. In case there’s anything too “complex” about this issue for the reader, let me make a comparison between seismic performance and paint performance. Suppose the City had been advised to paint the new bridge with a type of paint that would last for twenty years, and suppose the City had agreed to pay the extra cost for paint that would last 20 years instead of, say, five years. Now suppose that after that agreement had been signed, Focus found out that there was a secret rider in the City’s construction contract that stated that the City accepted that the paint might only last five years, even though it was still paying for paint that would last 20 years. Is that issue too “complex” for you to understand? Of course, poorly performing paint wouldn’t jeopardize public safety, and a new paint job is a relatively straight forward procedure. With seismic performance, though, it’s baked into the bridge and can’t be changed without very expensive material changes to the structure. With seismic performance, people’s lives and huge financial liabilities to City ratepayers are at stake. In the last two years, geoscientists have confirmed that two active faults, capable of producing an earthquake more energetic than that which toppled the elevated highway in Kobe, Japan in 1995, lie beneath Victoria. The Devil’s Mountain Fault, which surfaces a few kilometres south of Downtown, actually dips below the City itself. Victoria has the highest seismic hazard of any Canadian city. This is a real issue that, if Victoria’s elected officials ignore or ask dumb questions about, will have a profound impact on whether people live or die when a big earthquake here finally happens. So, before I get back to Councillor Loveday’s response to Huggett’s answer, let me pose a question to you, the reader. Would it be your expectation that City councillors should ask for an explanation of why that rider was inserted into the construction contract? If your answer is “Yes,” you’re thinking like Councillor Isitt. When Focus raised this issue back in 2015, Isitt point-blank asked Huggett to come back to council with an explanation of the document. Over the course of the following two months, Huggett did everything but what Isitt had requested: Provide an explanation of what the document was. In multiple reports to City of Victoria council and a media briefing, he provided an elaborate non-denial denial. Except for one brief reference to the document as a “memo,” his reports didn’t acknowledge its existence, let alone provide any explanation for how it might impact future liability for the City. After it became clear that Huggett was scrupulously avoiding providing councillors with an explanation of the contract rider, Focus filed an FOI for his communications with the other parties involved in designing and building the bridge. The documents released to us by the City showed two things: First, that Huggett never asked the creator of the rider, MMM Group, for an explanation of why the document had been created. At least, not in writing. Secondly, we found that none of the communications between the engineers denied that any of the provisions of the rider were, in fact, in play. Indeed, the former City employee who signed off on the rider document, Dwayne Kalynchuk, confirmed in writing to Focus that the provisions in the rider had been incorporated into the bridge’s design and construction. It should have been obvious to all of the councillors that Huggett had never provided them with an explanation of what the rider was. So when Huggett went back to the issue in his response to Loveday and told him the issue was too complex, would require debating in public with a journalist, and would use up a week of his expensive still-delayed-in-China-reports time, Loveday had his big moment to act in the public interest. To perform that service, he would have had to respond to Huggett something like this: “Hey, wait a minute, you never provided us with an explanation of what that contract rider is. Why was it created and how does it impact the City’s legal position in the case of a catastrophic event in which people are killed on the bridge or it can’t be used by emergency vehicles?” Instead, all Loveday could muster was, “I agree that’s not how we’d like you to spend your time.” David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. He’s been filing regular reports on the bridge project for eight years.

The project seems to be a complete fiasco. But is that just a perception created by something in the air? IN A REPORT HE DELIVERED to Victoria City council in late March, Johnson Street Bridge Project Director Jonathan Huggett did a 180-degree flip-flop on one of the project’s costly screw-ups. Before I tell you about that, though, I have to provide the reader with a caveat-emptor kind of warning about my story. The fact is, I may be suffering from a mind-altering overdose of carbon dioxide. I don’t think I’m making this up, but I might be. I came to realize this was a real possibility after coming across a 2015 study by research scientists at Harvard, State University of New York, and Syracuse University. I was earnestly googling away for what might be in the air that could possibly explain the widespread mental confusion we’re seeing south of the border these days. Is it something in the water? No, it’s in the air. These scientists reported that human cognitive abilities are significantly and adversely affected by the concentration of carbon dioxide that we are now regularly exposed to inside many buildings. Their work confirmed two previous but smaller studies that had come to much the same conclusion. The cognitive functions most severely impacted, the research found, were the ability to use information and the ability to strategize. So I need to warn you: I wrote this story while sitting inside a building. Moreover, my subject—Mr Huggett’s flip-flopping report—was presumably also written while the author was inside a building. Even worse, because of the likelihood of elevated levels of carbon dioxide wherever you are right now, your ability to process my potentially confused reporting of a potentially confused report could be compromised. By the end of this story, you may be completely dazed and confused. Before venturing into that minefield, consider this: The only real solution to adverse levels of indoor carbon dioxide is thorough ventilation with fresh, outdoor air. But, as the level of carbon dioxide outdoors continues to increase as a result of carbon emissions from human activity, ventilation will increasingly fail to make any difference. How bad could this get? The worst-case scenario is that global concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide will one day reach the levels that significantly affect human cognition. Confusion begins around 800 to 900 parts per million. Currently, outdoor levels are about halfway there and rising. Donald Trump seems eager to get all of us fully there, but being even halfway seems to allow for craziness enough. So reader beware, and let’s look—for the billionth time—at the Johnson Street Bridge project, whose nine-year history so far provides plenty of circumstantial evidence that carbon dioxide levels during City council meetings in Victoria need to be carefully investigated. JONATHAN HUGGETT, it turns out, is the most highly-paid official currently working for the City of Victoria. At $20,000 per month, he’s making more than even City Manager Jason Johnson, who hired him. Including expenses and taxes, Huggett is billing Victoria taxpayers approximately $295,000 per year. Not bad for a guy who lives in Surrey, only needs to report to City council four times a year, and isn’t required to answer questions from reporters. Since he’s so highly paid—by taxpayers—and since some of his claims about the project have seemed to be at odds with the public interest, Huggett’s reports beg for a detailed examination by local media. He has told Focus he’s too busy to answer our emailed questions, although he has made frequent appearances on local talk-radio programs. As Huggett’s open-ended contract with the City notes, the City also has a highly-paid “designer and project manager,” MMM Group. Since 2009 the City has paid MMM about $16 million for its services. As the “owner’s representative,” MMM, supposedly, would insure the City’s interests were given top priority by the company building the bridge, PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc. So why does the City need Huggett? Can’t MMM be trusted to do its job? According to his contract, Huggett was brought in by City Manager Johnson in April 2014, to “undertake an independent review of the Project, including assessment of the relationship between the City, MMM and PCL, to evaluate the current status of the project and potential risks to its successful completion.” But after undertaking that review and providing a report in July 2014, Huggett was appointed “Project Director.” He has spent the time since then providing quarterly reports formerly written by City employees in collaboration with MMM. The breakdown in trust between the City and its project manager became public in 2014 when both PCL and MMM began to present the City with claims for additional costs even though the City had been assured that project costs had been capped by a “fixed price” contract. Huggett’s first report to City councillor’s assured them that the City didn’t have a fixed-price contract. For some reason, councillors liked what they heard and Huggett’s monthly cost then escalated. With an extended period of legal battles likely to follow physical completion of the bridge, Huggett can expect to receive a monthly cheque from the City at least through 2018. If that’s the case, his own work on the project will add roughly $1.3 million to the cost of the new bridge. It’s unclear whether that amount has been fully included in any of the quarterly updates Huggett has delivered to City councillors. It should also be noted that Huggett does not track the bridge’s costs. That’s done by the City’s finance department. As well, the City is represented by an outside law firm—as well as its own highly-paid legal staff—on legal issues related to the project. Huggett has stated publicly a number of times that his job is to make sure the project gets completed. But Huggett has sometimes presented opinions to City council and the public that haven’t been based on facts. His use of—let’s call them alternative facts—have had the effect of protecting the reputations of professional engineers who have screwed up on this project rather than protecting the public interest. One good example of Huggett’s use of alternative facts was his response to a story Focus published about how the level of seismic protection stipulated for the bridge—the seismic design criteria—was secretly downgraded from the level that MMM had recommended. The essential facts of that story are these: MMM recommended to the City in 2010 that the new bridge be able to withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake and the City agreed to pay an additional $10 million for that recommended higher level of protection. However, after initial estimates from the construction companies bidding to build the bridge were received in 2012, project engineers realized that the bridge would cost much more than they had hoped. At least one of the companies also expressed concerns about the unusual design’s inherent seismic risk. For whatever reason—whether it was to reduce costs in an attempt to save a failing project or because the engineers realized the peculiar design could not withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake without irreparable damage—the project’s target seismic protection level was lowered. The decision to build the bridge to a lower seismic standard was made in secret—that is, without City council’s knowledge—and that broke the agreement City managers had made to seek elected officials’ consent to change the project’s scope. More importantly, the downgrading of the seismic design criteria meant the bridge could be more easily damaged by an earthquake. It also made it more likely the bridge would be unrepairable following a smaller earthquake. When Focus published a story pointing this out, Huggett’s response was to obscure what had occurred. His explanations never acknowledged the existence of the Johnson Street Seismic Design Criteria document which proved the change had been made. This document was an integral part of the construction contract the City signed with PCL. Instead, Huggett provided City councillors with a report in which a critical paragraph of the building code governing construction of bridges had been altered so that it appeared that the lower standard to which the bridge had been built was in accord with the requirements of the (altered) code. This was a truly remarkable sleight of hand, and I have wondered whether carbon dioxide might have been involved. What else could explain Victoria City council’s utter lack of ambition to look more closely at the issue? The City was in a position to demand that MMM return $10 million of its $16 million payment for its failure to provide a bridge with the level of seismic performance it had recommended. And what explains Huggett’s course of action? Instead of pursuing MMM, he misquoted the bridge code. A partially-redacted email (it was obtained by FOI) from an MMM employee to Huggett following the creative rewrite of the seismic code, expressed MMM’s relief “since the seismic issues appear to be contained for the time being.” Huggett never publicly admitted that such “issues” even existed, but it’s apparent that MMM expected the issue might resurface. So now we come to Huggett’s 180-degree flip-flop. (Also see the slideshow: Seismic rip-off on the Johnson Street Bridge) I RECENTLY REPORTED WHAT HUGGETT has said about the issue of fendering on the north side of the bridge. Fendering is the protective barrier placed around the support piers of a bridge to minimize the damage that could be done if a ship or barge accidentally hit the piers. Huggett told councillors in July 2015 that more extensive fendering was needed on the north side of the bridge than had initially been planned because, as it turned out, “The new bridge is somewhat less robust than the existing structure.” In explaining why this would add significantly more cost to the project than had been stipulated in the so-called “fixed-price” contract, Huggett told councillors that the north-side fendering had been “clouded-out” in a contract drawing. That indicated, he said, “It is not in the original contract.” But a review of the “fixed-price” contract by Focus strongly suggested that the cost of the fendering had been included, even if the final design of the north side fendering had not been fully worked out. In response to an FOI request from Focus, the City said it could not find the “clouded-out” contract drawing that Huggett had referred to, further eroding the credibility of his claim that the contract did not include the north side fendering. In spite of these facts, Huggett continued to maintain that the additional cost of the north side fendering could be substantial and would have to be borne by City taxpayers. The cost has been rumoured to be as high as $10 million. A rendering of fendering on the north side of the new Johnson Street Bridge from Jonathan Huggett’s March 2017 quarterly report to Victoria City Council, in which it was described as “one option.” One Victoria engineer estimated the installation could add $10 million to the cost of the project. Who was Huggett representing by taking this position? He is being paid $20,000 each month by Victoria taxpayers. Shouldn’t his positions reflect that? Let me boil this down to two points. First, why would Victoria be getting a bridge that was “less robust” than the existing bridge? Questions raised about the ability of the existing bridge to withstand the forces exerted on it by even a minor earthquake was the very rationale used for building a new bridge. Yet, according to Huggett, the new bridge would be less robust than the old bridge. Rather than openly accepting this apparent project failure, shouldn’t Huggett have been advocating for a better outcome? Secondly, why didn’t Huggett take the position that the cost of all fendering was in the PCL contract? In his report to City council in March, Huggett reversed his position and admitted that PCL’s fixed-price contract was “supposed to cover all fendering costs.” Huggett also provided details about the issue that have been kept secret for two years. Huggett revealed two errors that were made. One was made before the construction contract was negotiated with PCL and one afterward. Both subsequently “impacted” the design of the fendering, and hence its cost, Huggett reported. The first error was the relocation in early 2012 of an underwater duct bank containing numerous telecommunications cables, including fibre optic cables connecting CFB Esquimalt to the world. That $1.6 million project was engineered and overseen by MMM. According to Huggett, though, the duct bank “was not moved sufficiently far enough to allow for easy construction of fendering systems. Without additional protection measures, piles cannot be driven close to the duct bank as in the event of a ship collision the piles might move and damage the duct bank.” Unbelievable but—according to Huggett—true. By the way, the duct bank was relocated even before the City had a final bridge design, let alone a signed construction contract. At the time, City managers insisted such work needed to proceed in order for the project to meet its March 2016 completion deadline so that federal funding would not be lost. (Arbitrary deadlines and high levels of carbon dioxide are a truly awesome combination of conditions under which City councillors are asked to make important decisions, don’t ’ya think?) The second error identified by Huggett involved the City’s property at 203 Harbour Road. According to Huggett, “The City sold 203 Harbour Road to Ralmax as it was assumed the land was not needed for the construction of the bridge. This impacts an economical design since access to the water side frontage of 203 Harbour Road must be preserved.” That’s not quite true, though. The City actually transferred 203 Harbour Road and other adjacent properties to the Province in 2014 in exchange for the Crystal Garden property on Douglas. The Province then sold the Harbour Road properties to Ralmax. Regardless, Huggett is implying that whoever negotiated the transfer of 203 Harbour Road to Ralmax apparently neglected to obtain an agreement that would have allowed a minor intrusion on its riparian access to 203 Harbour Road to allow economical fendering for the bridge project. Wow. I bet the negotiating room had poor ventilation. Following delivery of Huggett’s March report to councillors, he appeared on CFAX. Among other things, Huggett told listeners the City hoped to recover, through legal action, the additional cost of fendering from the bridge’s “designer.” In Huggett’s contract with the City, the bridge’s “designer” is identified as MMM. A review of what MMM committed to in writing on the design and cost of fendering suggests that the City will have little chance of recovering that cost from MMM. But still, this is a complete flip-flop from Huggett’s previous position that the cost of north-side fendering was explicitly excluded from the original contract—and so the City would have to suck it up. Could he also flip-flop on the seismic issue and assist the City in getting MMM to return $10 million for that fiasco? Not likely. To flip-flop on the seismic issue would require that Huggett explain why he rewrote the bridge seismic code for a council report. That would be awkward for him to explain. Perhaps he could invoke a carbon-dioxide defence. SPEAKING OF CARBON DIOXIDE, one of the original premises used to justify building a new bridge in 2009 was that the existing double-bascule bridge presented a daily discouragement to thousands of would-be cyclists who, promoters claimed, were just waiting for a new bridge so they could abandon their daily commute by car. That would reduce carbon emissions, they said. Bicycle access across the railway bridge was eliminated in April 2011. If the bridge was a choke point before then, it has been even worse in the six years since. The prolonged disruption of vehicle traffic—with long waits on both sides of the bridge only adding to overall vehicle emissions—was never part of the bridge promoters’ calculations. The longer the bottleneck lasts, the more ridiculous the claim of reducing carbon emissions becomes. When will it end? The project has been on hold for months, waiting for completion in China of the lifting part of the bridge, which will span the remaining 41-metre gap. So far, fabrication of that one section of the bridge has taken over three years. How is that going? Explaining the project’s schedule—and why the bridge won’t be finished anytime soon, has been a major part of Huggett’s $20,000 per month assignment. In his September 2016 report to the City, Huggett said that Chinese fabricators had been working at fitting the rings to the trusses in preparation for a “trial fit-up.” “Painting of the structure will commence shortly,” Huggett reported. Three months later Huggett’s report noted that Chinese fabricators experienced difficulty fitting the first ring to the first truss, but Huggett expressed optimism that what the fabricators had learned would speed up fitting the other ring and truss together. It didn’t. Almost four months later, Huggett presented photographs that showed most of the major components had been fitted together, although there was no photographic proof that the north-side truss and ring had been matched. Photos published by the City showed Chinese workers apparently ready to lift the north-side truss into place on March 16. The photographs suggest painting of the bridge parts might be weeks—if not months—away. Yet Huggett had reported six months earlier that painting would “commence shortly.” So when is Victoria getting its new bridge? According to PCL’s original construction schedule, it would take slightly more than six months between the date the steel components were delivered to Victoria and the date the bridge could be opened for traffic. It would take another three months after that before the Blue Bridge could be removed and the project completed. So far, PCL hasn’t completed any of the tasks on its original schedule in less time than predicted. So, with the final shipment of steel components not expected to get to Victoria until September—according to Huggett—six months after that would put the bridge opening for traffic in February 2018, and project completion in early May 2018. One has to wonder: If those Harvard scientists are right about carbon dioxide affecting human cognitive function, did Shanghai’s notoriously dirty air play a role in the Chinese fabricators’ stumbling performance on Victoria’s new bridge? That seems possible. And there’s plenty of evidence of mental confusion at play on this project right here in Victoria, too. If there’s something in the air that’s making it more difficult for people to make good decisions, it’s a global phenomenon. Which means, of course, I, too, could be dazed and confused on the Johnson Street Bridge. How about you? David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

AS OF MARCH 10, 2017 there were 12 major construction projects underway in, or close to, downtown Victoria. Here's a look at what's being built.

Vic was broadly admired for his principled approach to civic politics. Focus interviewed him three times, the first in December 2012. We've gathered those stories below. Stumbles on the Path Forward by David Broadland, January 2013 Saanich councillor Vic Derman worries the six-year effort to envision an environmentally and fiscally sound sewage treatment plan is, so far, a failure. FOR A MOMENT the board room on the sixth floor of the CRD’s Fisgard Street headquarters erupted in pandemonium. Shouted insults, derisive laughter and expressions of disbelief filled the room. As two people stalked out of the December 12 meeting in apparent disgust, chairperson Denise Blackwell pounded her gavel and called for order. That little moment of drama followed the opening words of City of Victoria councillor Ben Isitt, who had just told fellow members of the CRD’s Core Area Waste Treatment Plan Committee, “I understand why Oak Bay council and director Derman have buckled to the tax revolt coming from the Uplands....” Isitt, sometimes impolitic in his choice of words, was making a point about a motion made by Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen. With the unanimous support of his council, Jensen was calling for “a full environmental study that will assess the comparative environmental impact of the current process and proposed process for disposing of liquid waste before the CRD plans are finalized.” Jensen had told the meeting, “The motion does not seek to abandon the idea of treatment, nor does it seek to overly delay the project.” It wasn’t so much Isitt’s unexpected equation that an environmental assessment equals a tax revolt that had elicited such an angry response from some of those witnessing the meeting. Or even his misplaced inclusion of Saanich councillor Vic Derman in that calculation. It was that in a few short words he had managed to cram a richly complex 30-year community-wide debate into a political statement about class conflict. Isitt went on to say, “ARESST is trying to stop the plan at any cost and they’ll deploy every possible argument. And this environmental assessment issue is just another red herring trying to delay action.” ARESST—the Association for Responsible & Environmentally Sustainable Sewage Treatment—self-described as “a group of ordinary, taxpaying Greater Victoria residents, deeply concerned about the local and marine environments, who believe that potentially disastrous mistakes are being made in the rush to develop a secondary sewage treatment system,” was well represented at the meeting. Their yellow-shirted members seemed to slightly outnumber a contingent of blue-shirted pro-treatment supporters. The latter, though, were boosted in stature by the appearance of an out-of-uniform Mr Floatie decked out in a sea-blue shirt. In the discussion that followed, Isitt’s view that Jensen’s motion was just a last-ditch effort to delay the project was shared, a little less bluntly, by other directors. Saanich councillor Susan Brice—who once served as mayor of Oak Bay—told her fellow directors, “Everything has been exhaustively gone over... I do not support the motion that’s on the floor because I do think it’s a motion to delay and I am not interested in delaying this any more.” But the question of whether the proposed plan should be examined to determine whether it will provide any real environmental benefits compared with the current ocean discharge of 90 million litres of raw sewage each day was debated more directly by some other committee members. Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins told the meeting her council had unanimously endorsed Jensen’s motion, and she appealed to directors to listen, “because I get the sense sometimes that ears are closed when certain speakers are speaking.” “We should be using climate change,” she suggested, “as one of the overall lenses” through which projects like this are considered. Derman, the alleged tax revolter, told the committee the benefits to the marine environment were unknown and the cost of the treatment plan, which has been estimated at $783 million, could hobble the region’s ability to address other problems. And he linked one of those problems, the high degree of single-occupancy vehicle use in the CRD, to deterioration of the marine environment. “The primary source of greenhouse gases in this region is transportation, which accounts for around 60 percent,” he reminded his fellow directors. “We know there’s way too many people moving around in single occupancy vehicles. We need to spend a lot of money to change that situation and put infrastructure in place. The biggest problem facing the marine environment globally today, by far, is the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The acidification of the ocean is the biggest threat, by a mile, and that comes from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This is a huge concern to marine scientists.” “So we need something,” Derman implored, “that says ‘What’s the net result going to be?’” Derman reminded directors that one configuration for a treatment system that had been briefly considered had the potential for six times greater greenhouse gas reductions than the plan chosen—“an incredible difference in environmental benefit—but no explanation was ever given by CRD staff as to why that option was dropped.” “If the rationale is to improve the marine environment, then we really do need to make sure we have a study that tells us exactly how much benefit we’ll receive...” Derman said. City of Victoria councillor and Regional Board Chair Geoff Young disagreed that another study was needed. “I really do hate to spend the committee’s time re-discussing an issue that has been discussed, but I think some response is required.” Young told fellow directors, “We’ve heard that we cannot prove sewage treatment is necessary. I think what we have really heard is that the level of uncertainty is so great that we can never prove that it is unnecessary.” Young expressed concern about “the effects of the many chemicals going into our ocean in our sewage at low levels. We see bioaccumulation in top level predators. Can we prove where it comes from? Maybe not easily. We hear evidence of impacts. It’s certainly not something I would want to dismiss out of hand. Someone mentioned greenhouse gases as our major environmental problem. It took 80 or 90 years for people to recognize the impact of GHGs on our environment. Some of those impacts [from bioaccumulation] may take as long to show up, and they may be as serious.” Young said he hadn’t hear any arguments from around the table “worthy of slowing down this project.” Jensen’s motion was defeated by a vote of ten to five. THE NEXT DAY I met with Vic Derman at a White Spot on Quadra Street. It was just after four but already young families were wandering in for an early supper. We found a booth with a big window and, over tea, talked about the perplexing politics of sewage treatment. On this issue there probably isn’t a politician in the CRD who knows more than Derman. His roots go deep down in this community. Born here in 1944, he still lives in the part of town where he went to school before attending UVic. He had a long career as a teacher, the last dozen years at Cedar Hill Junior where he started BC’s first multimedia computer lab. Derman has impeccable credentials in the environmental community. He, along with Briony Penn, Bill Turner, Bob Pert and Don Benn founded the Land Conservancy of British Columbia in 1997, and was the organization’s vice-president for their first five years. Penn told me she first met Derman in 1991 when he helped her in her fight to preserve a Garry oak meadow on Christmas Hill that was threatened by development. In 2002 Derman was named the CRD’s Environmental Citizen of the Year. An interest in the regional growth strategy brought Derman to civic politics, first through the North Quadra Community Association as vice-president and then as president. He retired from teaching when he was 55 because the many hours taken by his outside interests “weren’t fair to family.” First elected to Saanich council in 2002 and the CRD board in 2005, Derman characterizes his political style as “Not a wall-flower. I try to hold my powder and use it on the big issues. If I think there’s something wrong, I dig in as hard as I can.” Derman says he tries to look at local issues from what he calls “the 40,000-foot view.” In considering the sewage treatment issue, he says, that means “I can’t consider this by itself. What’s its impact on other issues, even on environmental issues?” At the CRD meeting the day before, his complex argument that spending on sewage treatment might mean not being able to afford transportation infrastructure improvements that, because of their greenhouse gas implications, could have a bigger benefit for the marine environment than treatment, might be seen by some as a call to inaction. But Derman says there are many politicians “that don’t really take the time, or have the inclination, to really get that understanding of the big picture of what we face, and so we have trouble really prioritizing things. There’s a lot who are satisfied with being incremental, moving forward by baby steps.” Like Desjardins, Derman thinks the treatment project needs to be part of the regional response to climate change. “I strongly believe that the biggest issue we face is climate change, by a mile, and that everything we do should go through a climate change lens.” He seems unwilling to settle for “baby steps.” Over tea, Derman launches into an hour-long recounting of several significant events in the past six years that left him with deep concerns that the process that produced The Path Forward—the current plan for treatment—was so flawed that the final product itself was bound to be likewise flawed. Soon after provincial Environment Minister Barry Penner ordered the CRD to prepare a treatment plan in 2006, Derman says he realized, “There is a certain environmental cost to treating. Is this the right thing to do? I didn’t know. So I suggested to the committee that we should challenge the minister on this. But the committee wouldn’t push back.” Instead, the long chain of events that led to Nils Jensen’s motion on December 14 began. In 2006 CRD staff put out a request for “Expressions Of Interest,” (EOI) to, as Derman put it, “see what was out there.” Derman says he made a pitch to the committee that the EOI be “wide open so we would get the best and brightest ideas,” and was given “assurances” by CRD staff to that effect. He told staff he wanted to read the submissions that came in himself, “without a filter.” About four months later Derman was given a box of 21 binders, submissions that came in response to the EOI. After reading through them all, he says, “I was really disappointed. There was nothing innovative. I thought, ‘Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there isn’t anything out there.’” In April 2007, Derman says, “CRD staff introduced The Path Forward, which is essentially the plan that’s there now.” But a few months later, in the summer of 2007, he was having lunch with Terry Williams, who Derman describes as “one of the greenest architects in town,” who told Derman he was disappointed his submission to the EOI had been rejected out of hand. “I asked him, ‘What submission? I read them all, and you didn’t have one.’” Williams pulled the submission out of his briefcase, which turned out to be based on resource recovery. Williams told Derman CRD staff had rejected the submission because it didn’t fit the terms of reference for the EOI. Derman says, “I was green, I had these assurances from staff,” but when he went back and looked at the EOI, he saw that it had been structured so that any proposal that didn’t fit into the existing network of pipes and pumps wasn’t considered. “Since then I’ve had concerns,” Derman tells me. “It seems that somebody believed they had the answer before they asked the question. The answer was The Path Forward.” Derman began doing his own research once he realized there were alternative technologies that weren’t being explored, and in September 2008 he brought a motion forward calling for a second EOI. The vote was six “for” and six “opposed,” which meant it failed. However, within minutes of the meeting’s adjournment, staff told him the vote had not been properly counted. There were actually 13 directors at the meeting and the motion had passed seven to six. But soon after he returned home, the CRD’s Kelly Daniels phoned Derman and told him that because it had been recorded at the meeting that the vote had been defeated, that result would have to stand. “That was disappointing for me,” he says. “It would have allowed the opportunity for less conventional processes to come through.” There were other signs the process was somehow being guided by an unseen hand toward a pre-determined end. Derman knew that a Technical and Community Advisory Committee had been set up to advise the sewage committee, but whatever they did wasn’t coming to his attention. So he asked a member what was going on. “They told me they did virtually nothing. One man told me, ‘All we ever do is read reports that you fellows have already passed, have our sandwich and go home.’ That kind of thing really alarmed me,” Derman says. He recounts his exploration of an option to The Path Forward’s plan for dealing with the sludge that would be produced by the treatment plant at McLouglin Point. The McLouglin site is too small for the biodigesters that would gasify the sludge. They would require five acres more than is available, and a search for a suitable nearby site was unsuccessful. So the engineering consultants devised a plan to locate the biodigesters 18 kilometres away, near the CRD’s Hartland Landfill. That would require a pipeline connecting the two sites. Derman told me, “The pipeline is about $30-40 million, the total capital cost is $265 million, and there would be an operating loss of $3-4 million a year.” The plan was to gasify 40-50 percent of the sludge, dry the remainder and—hopefully—ship the resulting “biosolids” to Vancouver where they would be burned in cement kilns. “The backup plan,” Derman tells me, “is to landfill it at Hartland, which is completely inconsistent with our goal of extending the life of Hartland.” So Derman did some research. “I went to one of the modern gasifier companies and said, ‘Can you guys handle this?’” After some back and forth between the company and CRD staff, Derman got a cost estimate for a plant with “100 percent redundancy” that would gasify “65 to 85 percent” of the sludge and produce an easily-disposable ash from the remainder. Derman says such a plant would require just over an acre of land and that could open up many options nearer to McLouglin Point that would work. “The estimate came back and capital costs would be $50-60 million and the operating cost would be $300,000 to $400,000 a year. I took it to the committee and said, ‘This is a saving of $200 million plus $3-4 million in [annual] operating costs. That’s pretty huge. So shouldn’t we look at this further?’ And the response I got from the committee and the staff was, ‘Oh, no, that can come at the procurement stage.’” Derman says that struck him as “hugely irresponsible.” “We knew then that the procurement stage was run by a commission, and local politicians have very little authority over that commission. As long as they stay within the budget and scope of the project, they control what happens.” I ask Derman if part of the impetus to delay the project was coming, as Ben Isitt suggested, from a concern about the affect it would have on property taxation. “Some people,” Derman says, “are simply saying ‘I’m over-taxed now, I can’t afford more.’ And then there are those who say ‘I want to make sure my tax dollars are spent well. If I think this is really necessary, I’m willing to spend the money. But I don’t think it’s necessary.’ I’m in that second group.” Derman worries about the “legacy” he’d be leaving for politicians who come after him “to do things like transportation improvements, health care, affordable housing. Victoria, I understand, has huge financial issues with infrastructure replacement down the road. Whoever is mayor and council, their ability to respond to that is going to be severely impacted by the costs of this project.” That cost, currently set at $783 million, was based on an estimate done by Stantec Consulting in June 2010. That was the very same month Stantec was peer-reviewing and approving a Class C cost estimate for the new Johnson Street Bridge that subsequently proved to underestimate costs by over 20 percent. A copy of Stantec’s sewage treatment estimate, titled “Probable Cost Breakdowns,” obtained by Focus through an FOI request, had price information redacted. But the nature of the document—it appears to be a single page in length, each line of the estimate consisting of a broad category of costs, such as “Siteworks” and “Struvite Recovery Plant”—suggests it may not even have the level of certainty of a Class C estimate. Asked about the estimate, Derman says, “It’s not a great estimate in terms of exactness. I think any competent engineer would tell you that. We don’t even know for sure what we’re building yet. I’m hoping it will be less. I’m hoping there will be a rational approach to the biosolids, which I’ve already suggested might make a very substantial saving.” But, Derman says, “We’re responsible 100 percent for any cost overruns. That’s scarey as hell.” Derman’s “40,000-foot view” has been hard for some of his fellow committee members to appreciate. “I’m sure there are those who regard me as a complete pain in the back end, that I’m there to be a nuisance, to try to make sure we never treat, or whatever. But that’s not the case at all. I want to make sure that we do something that is fiscally and environmentally the most appropriate thing we can do for the region.” David Broadland is the publisher of Focus. Courage, not lip service, please By Leslie Campbell, October 2014 With civic elections coming, we need to demand bold, visionary action on climate change. At the Climate Change Summit in New York City, our prime minister was conspicuously absent, and Minister of Environment Leona Aglukkaq committed to only modest reductions in transportation emissions, something the US is forcing on us with its car manufacturing standards anyways. The People’s Climate March, however, offered more hope—that a movement of the people might be powerful enough to force the political and corporate foot draggers to get on with an appropriate response to the threat to all species posed by climate change. Politicians at all levels are great at paying lip service to the need to change course, to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. They are not so great, however, on the follow-through—implementing policies and laws strong enough to have a real impact. Some no doubt are in thrall to their corporate donors and cronies (see “Sleeping with the fossils” in this edition); others fear getting voted out of office. Citizens will need to convince politicians they will lose votes if they don’t act boldly on climate change. Andrew Weaver, in a recent CBC interview, lamented: “When I look around the legislature and see my colleagues not wanting to step up and deal with [climate change], I wonder where their courage is.” Saanich Councillor Vic Derman has similar concerns about the courage of his colleagues at the municipal level. At a September lecture on the “Natural City” at UVic’s Geography Department, Derman described a toolbox for making cities more in tune with ecological systems. Foremost in this toolbox is the climate change lens, which Derman says we must now apply to any project or decision. Among the mostly student audience, I noticed Richard Atwell of the RITE Plan—and Saanich mayoral candidate. Both Derman and Atwell believe that if the sewage treatment problem had been viewed through a climate change lens, we would likely have distributed enhanced tertiary treatment with resource recovery underway now. Instead we are wasting money, time, and emissions on the stalled megaproject. (The Johnson Street bridge is another good example; we’d likely have a fully rehabilitated Blue Bridge if the climate change test had been applied there.) Derman, a former teacher, Saanich councillor since 2002, and CRD director since 2005, has been the lone voice among the five Saanich councillors on the CRD questioning the sewage treatment plans in a rigourous way—and particularly from the perspective of climate change. (Seaterra has stated that the current CRD plan would reduce emissions by 6000 tonnes per year; the most pessimistic estimate of emissions reductions in a 2008 study of tertiary treatment with resource recovery was 367,500 tonnes per year. See “Mayor Jensen’s Flip-flop,” Focus, July/August 2014.) At his lecture, Derman outlined the bleak prognosis for a planet on course for 4-degree Celsius rise by 2100: ocean acidification, mass species extinction, crop failures, and hundreds of millions of refugees giving rise to social instability. By fiddling with the primary systems that support us, we are, he says, “creating a hostile environment for our children.” We need “to mitigate like crazy,” he says, and fast. While he discussed many ways to address climate change through his Natural City approach, key among them were transportation and land use: “They are unavoidably linked. Bad transportation choices encourage sprawl. If you choose sprawl, you end up with a transportation nightmare.” Because 62 percent of Saanich’s emissions come from on-road transportation, tackling that sector makes sense. (By comparison, City of Victoria’s emissions from transportation are 40 percent.) Density—compact land use—matters. Derman believes no building or subdivision —even those with LEED construction—is sustainable if it fosters urban sprawl. He feels most politicians know this. It’s embedded in the Regional Growth Strategy and Saanich’s Official Community Plan. The latter states: “Incorporate climate change, its potential impacts, and mitigation measures when reviewing new development applications and undertaking long-term planning initiatives.” Yet, too often at decision time, politicians forget to do this. “We say climate change is a priority, but then we make all sorts of decisions that exacerbate it,” said Derman. For 15 years now the CRD has been committed to three priority “modes”: walking, cycling and public transit. Yet on-the-ground improvements are slim. Other cities with far colder weather (e.g. Stockholm) have fostered a much stronger cycling culture. Derman—who rode his bike to the lecture—said, “We need to make it safe, convenient, attractive and comfortable. Most of us don’t like cycling with a double decker bus beside us.” But the most crucial thing to do on the transportation emissions front involves land-use planning. “If you want people to walk, you need to give them pleasant pedestrian walk ways—and give them somewhere to walk to.” Unfortunately many regional neighbourhoods do not have grocery stores and other services within walking distance. “We need to create cities full of people places and green spaces…Great urban streets provide rich opportunities for interaction and exchange,” said Derman. Conduits-for-cars like the Douglas corridor and Blanshard (Mayfair Centre to Uptown) are good examples of how to create community dead zones. To sell people on denser cities, we must plan adequate green space, as well as commercial and cultural hubs within walking and biking distance. Again, Derman feels many of his colleagues know this, but don’t bring that knowledge to their decision-making. He cites his failed attempts to get Saanich council to “decouple” parking from housing units. Right now each unit constructed must have an off-street parking space. Not only does that add $55,000-$70,000 to the cost of the average housing unit, it also encourages car usage—and penalizes car-free people who not only pay for parking they don’t need, but subsidize the car ownership of others. Recently Derman opposed allowing secondary suites throughout Saanich, north of Mackenzie. (It’s already in place south of Mackenzie and he’s OK with that.) While increasing the housing supply is a worthy end, Derman argued in his submission to council: “Some neighbourhoods are remote from services, involve difficult topography and are not well served by transit. Unfortunately, placing suites in such areas is akin to placing a thin layer of sprawl on top of an existing layer. It provides some additional density but not enough to encourage new local services or substantially improved transit. The result is increased automobile use…[This] adds to problems of traffic congestion. Much more problematic is the fact it also results in more greenhouse gases and is contrary to OCP goals aimed at addressing climate change.” Yet not once do the words “climate change” appear in the 13-page staff report which recommends approval of secondary suites north of MacKenzie. Council voted to proceed to public hearing on the issue (October 7). This issue illustrates the challenge. Citizens like the secondary suite allowance because it helps with affordability, providing housing for lower income folks and revenue for mortgage holders. Their main concern was that off-street parking be required—another car-centric measure that must make Derman wince. We do need courageous, visionary leadership, as Derman urges. But we also need to inform ourselves. Many of us are not making the connections. Since we live in a democracy and believe the public should be thoroughly consulted, we need leaders and citizens who understand the issue—and the policies, opportunities, and limits climate change implies. We must all be willing to do more than pay lip service when it comes to changing our ways. Leslie Campbell is the founder and editor of Focus. Focus' last interview with Vic Derman, in December 2016, was included in Leslie Campbell's story on the CRD's regional growth strategy.

Project promoters are still claiming the new bridge will be “world-class” and “iconic.” Unfortunately, they may be right. IN A RECENT RADIO INTERVIEW, City of Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps described the new Johnson Street Bridge as “iconic” and “world-class.” Those words were optimistically attached to the project back in 2009 and Helps’ use of them eight years later is a bit like Donald Trump describing his popular-vote loss as “a massive landslide victory.” Both are ignoring, or don’t know, the factual history of their respective projects. So far, nearly four years of bridge construction has produced what looks like an ordinary concrete highway overpass with the middle missing. If the bridge is going to be “iconic” and “world-class” in the way that Helps meant, the missing piece will have to be so architecturally stunning and engineeringly remarkable that it’s able to lift the dull heaviness of what’s been built out of mediocrity. Unfortunately, evidence is mounting that the City has committed a world-class blunder. Fabrication of the missing part of the bridge—which will span a gap of 46 metres (151 feet)—has proved to be extraordinarily difficult for Chinese welders. They began work in early 2014 on a much-simplified version of the span originally designed by noted bridge architect Sebastien Ricard of WilkinsonEyre Architects in London, England. Not simplified enough, apparently. By mid-2014, quality control inspectors found the fabricated sections of the bridge had been made of such poor-quality steel, or so badly welded, that they had to be scrapped. Three years after starting, the Chinese welders were reported to be struggling to fit the pieces together. According to project reports, once the Chinese fabricators get the parts to fit, and assuming everything else goes smoothly from that point onward, both in China and Victoria, construction of the new bridge will be completed by early 2018. If that projection holds up, the 156-metre-long, 15-metre-wide (1) bridge will have taken five years to build. The City announced (2) the start of construction on May 17, 2013. Compare that with the indisputably “iconic” and “world-class” French bridge, the Millau Viaduct (photo below), completed in 2004. The 2460-metre-long, 27.6-metre-wide bridge (3) floats 270 metres above the Tarn River. It took three years to construct. A comparison of the project costs (4) (5) is also revealing. A standard method of comparing the cost of bridges is to divide the project cost by the area of the bridge’s highway deck (which are the dimensions given above). Doing that arithmetic (6) for the Millau and Victoria projects, we find that each square metre of bridge deck on the new Johnson Street Bridge will cost five times as much as a square metre of bridge deck on the Millau Viaduct (adjusted for inflation to 2016). So, in a way, Helps could be right. Victoria’s new bridge could very well be judged an “iconic” and “world-class” example of how not to build a bridge. The project’s problems go deeper than mere extreme cost and long construction delays, though. Many of the original objectives of the project—like architectural significance, a wider navigational channel, and seismic protection up to magnitude 8.5—had to be ditched as the project’s real costs became unhinged from consultants’ promises. But the story of why the project kept costing more, even as its promoters secretly stripped away promised benefits and features is, at its core, the story of what happens when old blunders are covered over by new blunders. The project was originally justified on the basis that the existing 1924 Joseph Strauss-designed bascule bridge had not been built to any seismic standard, and might collapse in an earthquake. Focus learned through freedom of information requests that City officials had been advised—in writing—by both of the first two engineers involved in the project, Joost Meyboom and Mark Mulvihill, that the City should seismically upgrade and rehabilitate the existing historically-significant bridge rather than replace it. Meyboom told the City that work could be done for $8.6 million (7). What followed was a long series of blunders and misrepresentations by City officials and private engineering consultants that, piled one on top of another, has led to a spectacular design failure and a series of cover-ups that have attempted to hide that failure. A full account of all the misrepresentations is beyond the scope of this article, but one particular misrepresentation, the impact of which is now working its way into the local economy, is worth exploring in depth. This particular misrepresentation was the inevitable consequence of rushing a poorly-understood design through a competitive bidding process in which all the bidders were warning the City that the project was risky in terms of cost and engineering considerations. Instead of doing the right thing—pausing the project to thoroughly assess the design—its promoters ignored the warnings and hid these concerns from elected decision-makers and the public. IN MID-JANUARY 2017, a letter (8) from Seaspan Marine to the City of Victoria was leaked to media outlets in Victoria, including Focus. Seaspan is a prominent tug and barge company operating on the West Coast. It frequently pulls barges and guides other vessels through the narrow channel spanned by the Johnson Street Bridge. In the letter, Seaspan told the City that recommendations to lower the speed at which it and other operators could make such transits, coupled with the “doubling of the transit distance”—a result of the project’s hasty decision to leave the concrete support piers of the existing bridge in place—“undermines safety rather than enhances it.” As a result, Seaspan’s Vice-President of Operations Paul Hilder wrote, “we will have to curtail barge service to businesses above the bridge and cease performing bridge assists to other operators.” Hilder requested that the City “reconsider their position to seek a reduce[d] speed limit from Transport Canada and the Victoria Harbour Master.” The current speed limit past the bridge is five knots. The City would like that reduced to 3.5 knots. Interviewed on CFAX radio, current Johnson Street Bridge Project Director Jonathan Huggett was asked if the speed change was being brought forward because a lower speed limit would allow the use of less robust fendering on the north side of the bridge. Huggett said that the issue was one of whether spending more money on fendering would be an appropriate use of public resources. More robust fendering would cost more money. The public resources at stake are not insignificant. It’s rumoured that more robust fendering, which would allow the current maximum recommended speed of five knots to be maintained, could cost in the neighbourhood of $10 million. The commercial interests of the Middle and Upper Harbour customers that Seaspan serves are also significant. Whose interest should prevail? Lost in the ensuing public discussion of whether the City should pay for more fendering protection so that barges could be pulled at the speed the mariners thought was safest, were two underlying questions. First, why was the cost of fendering on the north side of the bridge left out of the construction contract—if in fact it was—when councillors were asked to approve the contract in December 2012? Secondly, why would the new bridge not be able to withstand a five-knot collision on its north side if it was protected with the same kind of fendering that has protected the existing bridge on its north side? The existing bridge has been able to withstand hits by vessels moving at five knots over its 93-year life without it incurring damage to its lifting mechanism. It continues to provide reliable service. The City has avoided providing factual answers to these key questions. No wonder. Factual answers backed by evidence would reveal why the Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project will likely be an engineering case study on how not to build a bridge. To understand why, we need to go back to when the fendering issue first became public. Project Director Huggett brought the bad news about the north-side fendering into the public realm at a City council meeting on July 16, 2015. Back then, he had a slightly different story. At that meeting, Huggett told councillors that fendering for the north side of the bridge needed to allow for a five-knot speed and would add an additional $3 million—more or less—to the cost of the bridge. Councillor Ben Isitt asked Huggett: “Could you remind us why the fendering isn’t included in the scope of the contract with PCL?” PCL is the company building the bridge. Isitt was at the critical December, 2012 in camera meeting at which councillors were given the details of the contract and urged to approve it by City staff. In response to Isitt, Huggett asserted the existence of a contract drawing, one that Isitt apparently hadn’t been shown, in which the north-side fendering had been “clouded out,” signifying that it was not part of the agreement between PCL and the City. Huggett stated, “At the time we went forward with the contract it was left as an issue to be resolved.” A few moments later, again referring to fendering on the north side of the bridge, Huggett was even more definite: “It was not in the original contract.” After that meeting, Focus filed an FOI request for the document Huggett referred to as proof that the north-side fendering had not been included in the 2012 construction contract. The City was unable to locate any such document (9). Indeed, the PCL contract seems as explicit about the design and cost of fendering as it is about any other detail covering construction of the bridge and related structures. In its response to our FOI request, the City informed us it had “eight fendering drawings created in 2013 for the north side of the new bridge” that they said “do contain three drawings in which portions are clouded to identify portions of the fendering system that were put on hold.” But that was well after the councillors were shown the details of the contract and asked to approve it. In other words, there was nothing in the PCL contract itself to signify that north-side fendering was not included, but, as the project advanced, changes to the proposed fendering were contemplated. The City also informed us that it would not release those 2013 documents because the fendering was part of an ongoing legal mediation with PCL and release of the documents “could compromise the City’s negotiating position at the mediation table.” In other words, north-side fendering was included in the 2012 construction contract approved by councillors, but it has since become a bargaining chip in the unfolding legal dispute between the City and all of the other parties involved in the troubled project. Focus has obtained records (10) from the City that show Huggett had been made aware that senior City staff had agreed to a deal with PCL with respect to the cost of fendering, a deal which apparently didn’t include seeking approval from Councillor Isitt and other elected officials. Huggett was informed of this before he told councillors at the July 16, 2015 meeting that north-side fendering was “not in the contract.” Focus contacted Huggett for his explanation but he did not respond to repeated emails. So let me back up a bit and address the other fundamental question about the fendering issue that the City doesn’t want to answer: Why would the new bridge not be able to withstand a five-knot collision on its north side with the kind of fendering that has been protecting the existing bridge? At the council meeting at which Huggett first made this issue public, he also explained to councillors why fendering was so vital: “The new bridge is somewhat less robust than the existing structure,” he told councillors. Bingo. He continued: “The last thing I need is a barge to hit the rest pier and knock it two inches out of alignment. For one, I don’t know how I’d get it back again having knocked it out of alignment and then I’m faced with an inoperable bridge. You’ve got $100 million invested in the water here and I’ve got to protect it.” What Huggett was saying, in effect, is that if an outgoing barge loaded with scrap metal hits the new bridge, it is more likely to be made inoperable than would be the case if the same barge hit the old bridge. By “inoperable” we mean unable to lift or lower the moving part of the bridge. For a project that was originally justified on the basis of the existing bridge not being robust enough to survive the forces imposed on it by a significant earthquake—and thus posed a threat to public safety—this is an extraordinary admission of project failure. Huggett’s admission, by the way, apparently went right over the top of councillors’ heads. What characteristic of the new bridge makes it “somewhat less robust” to marine collisions than the existing bridge? We put that question to Huggett but he didn’t respond. But it’s not difficult to understand what’s really at issue. The first thing to note is that the north side of the main pier has been left unprotected since it was completed. This structure is called the “bascule pier.” It will house all of the machinery used to lift the bridge, and it supports the weight of the “bascule leaf”—the moving part of the bridge being fabricated in China. If protecting the pier itself was so critical, wouldn’t that have been put in place as soon as the pier was finished? Many loaded barges have been towed past it already. From the absence of protection, it’s not unreasonable to infer that it’s not the pier itself that’s vulnerable, but the bascule leaf that the pier will support. But why would that be so vulnerable? Imagine a tug pulling a barge full of scrap metal headed south from the Upper Harbour toward the new bridge—which in real life is a regular occurrence. The bridge would lift to its upright position to provide clearance for the tug and barge. But imagine that a strong tailwind suddenly catches the barge and the combination of wind, an ebb tide and a narrow channel result in the barge swinging around and striking the main pier of the bridge with great force. What would happen to the bascule leaf? Try to picture it: the erect span projects 50 metres into the air above the bridge deck—as high as a 15-storey building. When the barge hits the pier, how will that heavy steel projection behave? This is a particularly crucial design issue for this bridge, which has a one-of-a-kind feature: The bascule leaf’s 15-metre-diameter rings float on steel rollers and are not attached to the bascule pier. There is no central axle that’s bolted to the pier that will hold the leaf in place if the bridge is hit by a barge or an earthquake. There’s nothing but the leaf’s own weight to keep it in place. And, bizarrely, when this bridge is in the fully erect position, it’s top-heavy. As the bridge lifts, its centre of gravity actually rises. When it’s in the fully-raised position, more than half of the weight of the moving part of the bridge is above the highway deck and there is nothing—other than the wide stance of the rings—to keep the bascule leaf from being tipped to one side in reaction to the pier being hit by a barge. If the bridge were hit in a strong northerly wind that was already pressing the top-heavy leaf sideways, what would happen? Would there be enough momentum from the loaded barge transferred to the upright bascule leaf to tip it over sideways or shift it enough to damage the lifting machinery? Could the bridge get stuck in the upright position with no way, as Huggett put it, “to get it back again having knocked it out of alignment”? You might think that all of this would have been worked out years ago. But it wasn’t. Only in 2016, seven years after the open-ring design had been chosen, did the project evaluate “the severity of forces on the bridge and its associated structures resulting from impacts during tug and barge transit through the waterway between the Upper and Lower Harbors passing through the new Johnson Street Bridge when open.” The study, undertaken by Seattle’s Pacific Maritime Institute, determined that the worst probable impact would occur to the north side of the bridge’s main pier. The force of such an impact was estimated to be 1200 tonnes. What effect would that have on the bascule leaf in the open position? The City isn’t saying, but what we do know is that the project proceeded in 2013 without such an evaluation. Now the City faces the additional cost of ensuring that a 1200-tonne impact never occurs. Let me summarize: The City can’t provide any evidence of Huggett’s assertion that the fendering for the north side of the bridge was explicitly excluded from the 2012 PCL contract. And, although the City and Huggett would not answer questions about the positional stability of the unattached bascule leaf in a barge collision, what is known suggests the project realized—after construction had begun—that the experimental design created an unforseen vulnerability. This has been the modus operandi of the project since 2009. At critical moments, when it was realized the open-ring design would produce a construction-cost risk or a seismic risk or an operational risk, the project’s promoters hid the risks. They misled councillors and the public about the flawed design to get more money to keep the project moving forward. The most iconic, world-class moment on this long downhill slide occurred in November 2012 when City managers made their recommendation to councillors on the three construction bids. At a closed-to-the-public meeting, the managers urged councillors to allow them to begin negotiations for a contract with PCL, even though the company had produced a design in which every single element of the bridge had changed significantly from the design envisioned by the City’s project manager MMM, and WilkinsonEyre. Even though it wasn’t in the interest of any of the three bidding companies to alienate the City’s influential project manager, all had produced polite but scathing criticisms of the design and supporting engineering done by MMM. Two of the companies’ bids were based on completely different mechanical lifting concepts. PCL’s quickly-produced adaptation was the only option left to City managers for proceeding with the project. The City officials failed to relate any of the information in the critical reviews to councillors. Rather than accepting the realities exposed by the companies’ critiques—that MMM had greatly under-priced and under-engineered the design—the officials instead hid these concerns, and the accompanying financial risks, from councillors. Many of the senior City managers who played a direct role in this deception later departed abruptly as the implications of a hastily-conceived design on cost and construction duration became clear. Their replacements have been kept busy ever since hiding the ways in which the project had to be scaled back, including seismic protection, fendering, and the original architectural vision. WilkinsonEyre has now removed all traces of its association with the project from its website. As for the deceived, although then-Mayor Dean Fortin was removed by voters, most of the councillors who had the wool pulled over their eyes are still sitting around the council table, asking Mr Huggett polite questions about pathways and the kind of grass being planted on the bridge approaches. At a December council meeting City Manager Jason Johnson told those councillors that a “mid-term lessons learned” exercise on the project had been completed by City staff. Focus asked Johnson whether that exercise had included public input and whether the results were available to the public. In his response, Johnson didn’t answer either question directly but said the City “will release all of the findings when the bridge is finished.” More likely, the project will be protected under a shroud of legal advice for years to come, and making the “lessons learned” public would—and I’m just taking a wild stab in the dark here at what the City will say—“compromise the City’s negotiating position.” Thus City officials, former and current, will be spared public exposure of the role they played in the building of Victoria’s iconic, world-class blunder—and will be free to move on to other projects. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

Justin Trudeau linked approval of Trans Mountain to Alberta’s “100-megatonne cap” on oil sands emissions. Independent analyses suggest that cap has already been exceeded. Further expansion of oil sands exports could give Alberta a stranglehold on Canada's allowable emissions by 2028. WHEN PRIME MINISTER TRUDEAU announced approval of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, he linked that to Alberta’s goal of limiting emissions from oil sands production. “We could not have approved this project without the leadership of Premier Notley, and Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan—a plan that commits to pricing carbon and capping oil sands emissions at 100 megatonnes per year,” Trudeau told Canadians. The prime-ministerial logic here is challenging. Just ten days before, his Environment Minister Catherine McKenna had announced Canada’s emissions goal for 2050 would be 150 megatonnes—for the whole country. To accomplish that would require reducing national emissions by increments of 18 megatonnes every year from now until 2050. Yet Trudeau’s first action following McKenna’s announcement was to approve a project that would allow Canada’s annual emissions to grow by 18 megatonnes. Even though they pull in opposite directions—one to higher emissions and the other to lower—Notley’s promise and McKenna’s goal amount to the same thing. They’re both paper-thin promises that can be broken at any time depending on who is governing Alberta and Canada. At the Trans Mountain announcement Trudeau said, “Climate change is real. It is here. And it cannot be wished or voted away.” On his assertion that climate change is real, a majority of British Columbians would probably agree. But both Trudeau and Notley can be voted away, and so can their legislation. An expanded pipeline from Alberta to BC’s south coast, on the other hand, will create a permanent increase in risk to both the environment and southwest BC’s economy. Many Vancouverites and Victorians won’t let it happen without a fight—a physical one if it comes down to that. But Trudeau’s linking of Trans Mountain with Notley’s pledge of “capping oil sands emissions at 100 megatonnes per year” creates a challenge for the prime minister. Where is the proof that limit hasn’t already been exceeded? If it can be shown that oil sands emissions are already over 100 megatonnes, would he rescind approval of the project? And on whom should the burden of proof fall? Trudeau also said that Trans Mountain—by allowing oil sands production bound for export to grow substantially—would be good for Canada, economically. While that assertion might have been true in the economic paradigm in which continuous growth in fossil fuel emissions was assumed to be a sign of economic health, in the new paradigm in which Trudeau and McKenna hope to lead Canada— one where national emissions must shrink by another 18 megatonnes every year—does it make any sense at all? Let’s start by examining the fundamental premise behind that “100-megatonne cap,” which is that it hasn’t already been exceeded. WHERE DID JUSTIFICATION FOR a “100-megatonne” cap come from? Was the concept dreamed up by the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission? Consider why the number “100” might have been chosen. Who wouldn’t celebrate reaching 100? But is there any scientific evidence that supports that cap? None has been offered. Indeed, there are strong indications Alberta’s oil sands projects have long passed that symbolic mark. Let’s begin with what Environment Canada claims. In 2014—the most recent year for which it has published figures (“Greenhouse Gas Emissions, April 2016”) describing oil sands-related emissions—they were put at 67.8 megatonnes. A “megatonne” is a million metric tonnes. Environment Canada provides only three numbers in its inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to support that figure: one for “Oil sands—upgrading,” another for “Oil sands—in situ” and a third for “Oil sands—mining and extraction.” That’s it. That’s Environment Canada’s entire breakdown of emissions for an industry regularly described as the “fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada.” Again, those three numbers added up to 67.8 megatonnes in 2014. The unavailability of information from the federal government around this highly controversial industry is startling. But because of the controversy—the oil sands have an international reputation as being a “dirty” source of energy—several independent analyses have been conducted to determine oil sands emissions intensity. By “emissions intensity” we mean the amount of greenhouse gases released for each barrel of bitumen produced. Such analyses include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other GHGs. The independent analyses—which have had varying levels of independence from the Alberta government and the oil sands industry—were conducted to compare the emissions intensity of fuels derived from oil sands bitumen with fuels refined from other sources of crude oil. Most of the studies divide the entire life cycle of a fuel into stages and assign an emissions intensity value to each stage. The stages include extraction, upgrading, transportation by pipeline to a refinery, refining, delivery from refineries to distribution terminals, and so on through to combustion. The emissions that Environment Canada attributes to the oil sands industry in Alberta are limited to those from extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation. Very little of Alberta’s bitumen is refined in Canada, and refining emissions are inventoried by Environment Canada in a separate category. So when Trudeau approved Trans Mountain because Alberta promised to cap “oil sands emissions,” it’s only those first three steps—extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation—that are included. The independent studies have arrived at different values for the overall carbon intensity of those first three steps. Using an average of those values, along with the oil sands production records of Alberta Energy Regulator and the National Energy Board, we can determine a reasonably good estimate of emissions attributable to those first three steps. What stands out in doing that arithmetic is that only by using a value for emissions intensity from the very bottom of the range produced by the independent studies could a value of “67.8 megatonnes” be obtained for oil sands emissions in 2014. In our effort to confirm Environment Canada’s oil sands emissions, we used the average values for “Canadian Oil Sands” “extraction” and “crude transportation” determined by a 2014 study conducted by the US Congressional Research Service (US CRS). That office describes itself as “providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation.” Its report was a meta analysis of six previous studies that determined emissions from the oil sands. The US CRS determined an average emissions intensity of about 20 grams of carbon-dioxide-equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced, including extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation. That works out to 122 kilograms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per barrel of bitumen produced. To cover the additional energy required for upgrading, we used a standard 10 kilograms of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions per barrel. When those numbers are applied to the oil sands’ 2015 production volumes recorded by Alberta Energy Regulator, emissions from Alberta’s oil sands operations grow to about 116 megatonnes. That suggests oil sands emissions could already be significantly higher than Notley’s 100 megatonne cap. To obtain Environment Canada’s much lower, official level of emissions for the oil sands projects, carbon intensity values about one-half of that determined by US CRS would need to be used (11 grams of carbon dioxide for each megajoule of bitumen produced). A study done by the Jacobs Consultancy in 2012 placed oil sands production emissions in that range. (This study was not included in the US CSR’s analysis.) But that study’s authors noted, “Jacobs Consultancy has not made an analysis, verified, or rendered an independent judgment of the validity of the information provided by others.” The Jacobs study was commissioned by the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission. That Alberta government organization’s mandate includes responsibility “for exploring new opportunities for building new markets for oil and gas products within North America and abroad, and improving access to current and new markets for oil sands products…” Do I need to point out that APMC are trying really hard to sell more bitumen? An earlier study done by Jacobs for the Alberta Energy Research Institute in 2009 was included in the US CRS study. That study determined values much closer to 20 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced. A 2013 scientific study, “Historical trends in greenhouse gas emissions of the Alberta oil sands, (1970–2010)” by Jacob Englander et al, also provides data that challenges the Alberta/Environment Canada version of emissions. It considered data from each of the oil sands projects and put production emissions intensity at 20 to 22 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced. It estimated emissions related to extraction, upgrading and pipeline transportation in 2010 were about “70 megatonnes.” Applying the large increase in daily production that has occurred since 2010 to Englander’s estimate, annual emission from the oil sands in 2015 would be approximately 117 megatonnes. Additional scientific research published in 2015 by Sonia Yeh et al on the net emissions associated with land-use impacts resulting from oil sands production helps to illustrate the significant undercounting of emissions that is occurring. The authors note: “We found that land use and GHG disturbance of oil sands production, especially in-situ technology that will be the dominant technology of choice for future oil sands development, are greater than previously reported.” Based on expected production levels out to 2030, the authors estimated emissions as high as 10 megatonnes per year just from land use impacts. The 2013 Englander study put land-use impact for in-situ production at zero, so even its finding of emissions intensity is likely an undercount of actual emissions (Englander contributed to the Yeh study). Yet Englander’s value for emissions intensity translates to overall oil sands emissions being nearly twice as high as Environment Canada admits. The current scientific evidence and level of uncertainty, then, conflict with information created by industry and government marketing organizations. Yet that clash is invisible in Notley’s vaunted Climate Leadership Plan. In the 97-page “Report to Minister” that launched the plan, feel-good aspirations about possible reductions in oil sands emissions intensity abound, but there isn’t a single direct account of current oil sands emissions. There is an indirect reference—in a pie chart—that, if a reader does the arithmetic, suggests emissions might have been 58 megatonnes in 2013. But the avoidance of a rigorous accounting of current oil sands emissions in Notley’s plan is a flashing yellow light: What are current emissions and what does that include? Focus requested a detailed inventory of all greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s Climate Change Office. The only data it could provide was collected under Alberta’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reporting Program. That information covered only half of Alberta’s acknowledged overall emissions and was limited to “facilities” that emitted 50,000 tonnes or more each year. The most recent report that’s available covers 2013 and doesn’t reflect significant increases in oil sands production since then. It put 2013 emissions at 58 megatonnes, just like the pie chart in Notley’s Climate Leadership Plan. Since 2013, Alberta oil sands production has increased by about 629,000 barrels per day. That increase alone, at the US Congressional Research Service’s carbon intensity average of 20 grams of carbon-dioxide-equivalent for each megajoule of bitumen produced, would have added close to 30 megatonnes. Added to Environment Canada’s dubious 2013 account of oil sands emissions, Alberta would now be at 94 megatonnes. Let me sow a little more doubt about Environment Canada’s account of emissions. In the same publication as it provides its brief three-number summary of oil sands emissions mentioned earlier, it also summarizes “fugitive emissions” for all of Canada’s oil and gas industry, including the oil sands. Fugitive emissions are the greenhouse gases that escape from tailings ponds, oil sands mine faces, oil and gas valves, pumps and pipelines, and so on. Environment Canada claims 30.5 megatonnes of oil- and gas-related fugitive emissions for 2012 (see its Table A.4. above). Yet provincial breakdowns of emissions data from Canada's National Inventory Report of emissions filed with the UN for 2012 show that fugitive emission produced by the oil and gas industry were actually 61 megatonnes. In other words, there’s 30 megatonnes of fugitive emissions from Canada’s oil and gas industry that are missing from Environment Canada’s description of the industry’s emissions. The lion’s share of oil and gas fugitive emissions, by the way, are released by Alberta—35 megatonnes each year. That missing 30 megatonnes largely makes up the difference between the public perception of where oil sands emissions are currently (68 megatonnes) and Notley’s Cap (100 megatonnes). When questioned by Focus, Environment Canada was unable to explain why fugitive emissions from the oil and gas industry were not fully counted in its depiction of national oil and gas sector emissions. It noted that the missing emissions were included in Canada’s National Inventory Report as submitted to the UN. Trudeau and McKenna know that Canada’s emissions reporting procedures need to be improved and have proposed legislation to accomplish that. Under Stephen Harper’s climate-change-skeptical government, the reporting threshold for an industrial emitter had been 100,000 tonnes per year but was lowered to 50,000 tonnes in 2010. Now Environment Canada is hoping to move that down to 10,000 tonnes. But on the day Trudeau approved Trans Mountain, he expressed certainty that the facts and figures were on his side. “This is a decision based on rigorous debate, on science and on evidence,” Trudeau said. “We have not been and will not be swayed by political arguments—be they local, regional or national.” Prime Minister Trudeau linked approval of Trans Mountain to oil sands emissions not exceeding 100 megatonnes. But the best analysis that’s been applied to measurement of those emissions suggests it could already be as high as 120 megatonnes. That’s not a political argument. It’s a serious question about the “evidence” Trudeau is using. NOTLEY'S CAP, the promise to somehow hold oil sands emissions to no more than 100 megatonnes, presumes they’re currently either 58 (Alberta) or 68 (Environment Canada) megatonnes. Through the cap, Alberta is giving itself permission to ramp up oil sands production by about 50 percent above current levels. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ 2016 projection to 2030 show oil sands production climbing to around 3.5 million barrels a day by about 2028 and then beginning to accelerate. At the same time, the Trudeau government is acting on its commitment to significantly reduce Canadian emissions by imposing an escalating price on carbon for any province that doesn’t follow its lead. The contradiction of facilitating oil sands growth while discouraging the use of fossil fuels with a carbon tax or fees is jarring enough. But the bizarre, long-term consequences for the Canadian economy of these two initiatives, if they both play out as hoped for by Trudeau and Notley, seems to have been overlooked. As national emissions decline, emissions caused by production of bitumen destined for export will come to dominate Canada’s carbon budget. If Alberta’s fossil-fuel exports have a stranglehold on allowable emissions, its oil and gas industry could choke off economic opportunity in the rest of Canada. Oil and gas extraction have high emissions per dollar of economic value that they create. Other industries in the same boat, like electricity and heat utilities, construction, manufacturing, forestry and agriculture, will be required to pay the same level of carbon fees for their activities even though their products—electricity, heat, infrastructure, housing and food—are essential to the well being of Canadians. Are exports of fossil fuels to the US necessary for Canadians to have a good quality of life? Where is the proof of that? How soon might the strangling of the Canadian economy begin? For the analysis below, we start with Environment Canada’s numbers. Environment Canada reports that, in 2014, 192 megatonnes of emissions were attributable to the oil sands and conventional oil and gas industries. As noted earlier, however, Environment Canada had removed 30 megatonnes of fugitive emissions from that account. If we put them back in, emissions related to Canada’s oil and gas industries were 222 megatonnes. How much of that was attributable to exported fossil fuels? That year, according to the National Energy Board, 77.5 percent of crude oil and 47.5 percent of natural gas was exported. If those percentages are applied to the appropriate components of Environment Canada’s 222 megatonnes, emissions related to net exports of natural gas and oil, including bitumen, total 146 megatonnes. So, two years ago, using Environment Canada’s suspect numbers, just emissions resulting from production of fossil fuels destined for export were already pushing McKenna’s mid-century goal of 150 megatonnes for Canada’s entire emissions budget. If oil sands production continues to grow at the rate projected by Alberta Energy Regulator, then emissions from producing fossil fuels for export will climb at about the same rate. You might ask: Won’t there be improvements in emissions intensity? The previously-mentioned study by Englander et al indicates the industry has flat-lined on improvements in emissions intensity since about 2005 and the increase in the extent of in-situ extraction, which is more emissions intensive than surface mining, could cancel out any efficiency gains that might be possible through improvements in technology. In-situ extraction involves injecting steam into the ground deep below the surface and, in effect, melting the bitumen out of the sands that contain it. It’s a process that involves burning a lot of natural gas to heat up water for steam. That form of extraction is expected to account for 60 percent of all bitumen production by 2025. By 2035, emissions from production of fossil fuels destined for export could eat up more than 50 percent of all allowable emissions as Canada reduces its national emissions towards McKenna’s goal of 150 megatonnes. By 2045, producing fossil fuels for export could consume all of Canada’s allowable emissions. If oil sands emissions have been underestimated to the extent suggested by the US CRS emissions intensity finding and other studies, emissions related to fossil-fuel exports could consume half of Canada’s carbon budget by 2028—and all of it by 2040. Not included in this analysis is the potential for a large increase in emissions that would result from an increase in export of natural gas from Alberta, not covered by Notley’s Cap. The province’s vast and largely untapped reservoir of shale gas—estimated by Alberta to be 110 times larger than its conventional gas reserve—could come under intense development pressure if natural gas production in the US begins to falter. The inevitable consequence of allowing oil sands production to grow—rather than starting to cut it back now—will be that Canada’s allowable emissions will be dominated by production of low-value bitumen for export, mainly to the US. Canada would never be able to turn off our powerful neighbour’s supply. Our country’s economic role in the world would then be to serve as America’s pump jockey. When Trudeau announced approval of Trans Mountain he told his audience: “I have said many times that there isn’t a country in the world that would find billions of barrels of oil and leave it in the ground while there is a market for it.” The prime minister is apparently stuck on that idea and is unable to see that it no longer fits with the more fundamental need to lower carbon emissions and prepare properly for the low-carbon economy that Canada needs to build. Meanwhile, as Alberta’s premier flails about in a sea of low-value hydrocarbons, her promises threaten to pull the rest of Canada under with her. Trudeau has thrown her a life-ring, but to what end? David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. He invites readers to comment on the ideas included in this article. Related stories by David Broadland Did the BC government fake LNG numbers before last year's election? (March 2014) Jobs, jobs, jobs—and other exaggerations (June 2013)

North Americans are becoming increasingly innumerate and vulnerable to disinformation. IN VOTE COUNTING for the US presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s tally reached 65,844,610 by mid-December. Donald Trump was at 62,979,636. But Clinton’s definite popular vote victory—2,864,974 votes—had already been run through the Republican uncertainty-making machine with predictable results. Soon after the election, Alex Jones’ Infowars website, on no evidence, claimed “Virtually all of the votes cast by 3 million illegal immigrants are likely to have been for Hillary Clinton.” President-elect Trump then tweeted: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Of the millions of people who voted illegally, the Washington Post could find only four who were facing charges of electoral fraud a month after the election. Who were they? In Iowa, Terri Lynn Rote voted twice for Trump because, she said, “The polls are rigged.” She blamed Trump for her crime. In Texas, Phillip Cook was arrested after voting twice. He told authorities he worked for the Trump campaign and was testing the security of the voting system. Audrey Cook, an election judge in Illinois whose husband died before he was able to complete his mail-in ballot, finished it for him. So sweet. Mrs Cook was a Republican election judge. The fourth case didn’t actually involve the presidential vote. Gladys Coego, an election worker who had access to completed absentee voter ballots in Florida, was caught putting marks beside a certain mayoral candidate’s name on ballots where the rightful voter had left the vote for mayor blank. The Post also found a few cases of possible voter fraud where no charges had been laid. After his claim of “millions” of illegal voters, Trump was challenged by a CNN journalist to provide evidence. The president-elect cranked up the uncertainty-making machine again and flipped truthfulness on its head with another tweet: “@jeffzeleny what PROOF do u have DonaldTrump did not suffer from millions of FRAUD votes? Journalist? Do your job!” This is, of course, just one example of Trump’s refusal to admit that something he said before, during or after the election was provably wrong or unsupported by any evidence. The disinformation—intentionally false or misleading information spread in a calculated way to deceive target audiences—he and his campaign created has been unprecedented in a modern-era American presidential election. America’s media had some difficulty knowing how to cover Trump as a candidate and then as president-elect. Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker, speaking about how media ought to describe Trump’s distortions of reality, noted, “I’d be careful about using the word, ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.” But, as Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out in a response to Baker, “…Trump barely even tried to make a fact-based case for his version of reality. Rather, he seemed to be trying to obliterate any possibility of shared agreement on what constitutes an authoritative source, and even on reality itself.” Why were so many Americans taken in by Trump’s provably wrong versions of reality? A month after the election, a poll of 1011 Americans, commissioned by the Post, found 52 percent of Republicans and 24 percent of independents believed Trump had won the popular vote. Even seven percent of Democrats thought the same thing. Overall, 29 percent of those polled believed Trump had won the popular vote. On an important fact about which Americans could have been certain and ought to have agreed, they had, to a surprising degree, got it wrong. The biggest factor in being wrong seemed to be partisanship. But mixed in with that was the likelihood of significant innumeracy. The Post’s poll found a strong correlation between low educational achievement and belief that Trump had won the popular vote. In a 2013 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that measured the level of numeracy in 22 democracies, the US scored third from the bottom. Canada was a few notches up, but still below the average score. Finland and Japan scored highest. The historical trend in the US is to a lower level of numeracy. To be numerate means much more than being able to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers. It includes the ability to reason, which, according to Wikipedia, is “the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.” In other words, a person with a healthy level of numeracy would be able to figure out who won the popular vote in the 2016 US presidential election, would comprehend what that meant and would not fabricate falsehoods to discredit Clinton’s plurality of votes. She won the popular vote; he won the electoral college. The deteriorating state of numeracy/reason in the US and Canada will make it much harder to resolve such pressing issues as climate change. If such a significant fraction of Americans can’t figure out who won the popular vote, or are willing to create a different outcome from non-existent facts (and then challenge journalists to disprove their non-existent facts) what hope is there for a coherent response to climate change? With a president who, as a candidate, said he thinks climate change is “a hoax,” not much. In Canada, we are slowly extracting ourselves from a long state-sponsored disinformation campaign that supported development of Alberta’s oil sands far more than it heeded scientists’ warnings about climate change. Like Trump’s made-up claim about millions of illegal voters, the federal government under Stephen Harper manufactured uncertainty about climate change, on the one hand, and certainty about the wisdom of developing the oil sands on the other. This will take some time to undo and will require, for one thing, Canadians to become numerate about climate change and emissions. Otherwise we will remain vulnerable to corporate and government disinformation. It will also require credible and much more stringent reporting on the level of emissions in Canada from Environment Canada. This is particularly needed for the oil sands projects and for the proposed pipelines that would facilitate their expansion. Even a cursory examination of official emissions reporting suggests emissions may be much higher than Environment Canada, under Harper’s management, has acknowledged. David Broadland is the publisher of FOCUS.

The choice of the controversial site over Rock Bay will lead to hundreds of millions in costs that could have been avoided. UNPUBLICIZED WARNINGS from the engineering company Stantec to the Seaterra Commission in 2013 show there’s a big difference between what the public has been told and what CRD bureaucrats and their corporate proxies know about a wastewater treatment plant at McLoughlin Point. Simply put, a plant squeezed onto the tiny McLoughlin site is going to present regional taxpayers and the environment with big problems. Soon. Within a few years of the plant’s commissioning, costly new treatment capacity will have to be built elsewhere to avoid the expense and environmental impacts resulting from the heavy use of chemicals that will be needed to keep the plant operating to federal regulation standards. Senior CRD bureaucrats aware of these circumstances failed to disclose to the public McLoughlin’s serious limitations during a 2-year-long reconsideration of the site’s suitability. As a result of these circumstances, and the CRD’s recent move to start planning for a second wastewater facility in Colwood, Victoria taxpayers will likely be facing a bill for three widely separated treatment plants at an additional cost of hundreds of millions of dollars above what it would have cost to construct a single expandable plant at the relatively spacious Rock Bay site. Below I will describe a number of issues that arise from the diminutive physical size of the McLoughlin Point property, which a peer review had warned the CRD in 2009 was “extremely small” for a sewage treatment plant. It would appear that issues vital to the public’s understanding of this project have been deliberately hidden from both elected officials and the public. At the end of this article I will examine the question of whether the withholding of this information may have created an avenue for a court challenge of the project. Let’s start here: In September 2013, Stantec engineers responded to what they called “pointed questions” about the capacity of a proposed wastewater treatment plant at McLoughlin Point to handle expected liquid flows and organic loads. The engineers’ written response to these questions, submitted by the Seaterra Commission then overseeing the project, included the distinct possibility that the plant’s design capacity could be exceeded by the time the plant was expected to become operational in 2018. But, if that happened, the engineers told the commission, “CEP operation would most likely be implemented to maintain adequate capacity until 2040.” Focus was given a tip that led to the Stantec memo. A search of CRD records indicates Stantec’s September 2013 warning was never shared by CRD staff with elected officials in a public meeting. By “CEP operation” the engineers meant “chemically-enhanced primary treatment,” (CEPT) a costly and increasingly contentious add-on to primary treatment that is sometimes employed to reduce the level of phosphorous and/or nitrogen being discharged to waters that are particularly sensitive to eutrophication, such as lakes. During CEPT operation, three different chemicals are injected into the influent as it flows through a wastewater plant, increasing the rate at which solids are removed. But those chemicals end up in the sludge produced by sewage treatment and create a big problem: The sludge can’t be incinerated, used as fertilizer, or recycled in any useful way. UBC engineering professor Dr Don Mavinic, an expert on sewage treatment, told Focus in 2014: “This is a huge problem in Ontario right now. It’s become very contentious. Very few landfills will accept the sludge now. Most incinerators won’t touch it. Ontario has ended up with this chemical soup that has to be stored somewhere because you can’t do anything with it.” In Victoria’s case, DFO scientists have determined that eutrophication isn’t a concern. But CEPT is also used in plants that have reached the upper limit of their design capacity. The aging Lions Gate treatment plant in North Vancouver—slated for replacement by 2020—began using CEPT in 2014 as it bumped up against its capacity limit. That a new plant at McLoughlin Point would need to implement CEPT soon after it had been constructed in order “to maintain adequate capacity,” as Stantec acknowledged in 2013, is extraordinary. In the recent 18-month-long consideration of optional sites, McLoughlin wasn’t on the table. As a result, questions about the site’s suitability lay dormant and Victorians were never informed that the excess capacity of a treatment plant there could be used up as early as 2018. Prompted by a letter to CRD directors from this reporter, the issue of McLoughlin Point’s limited capacity was raised at a CRD Board meeting on September 14. At that meeting, elected officials voted to proceed with the McLoughlin treatment plant. But before that vote, CRD directors were given an opportunity to question members of a “Project Board.” The Project Board’s Chair, Jane Bird, and Vice Chair Don Fairbairn—both Vancouver residents who have no previous experience directly related to sewage treatment—took questions about the Project Board’s choice of McLoughlin Point over other options. CRD Director Colin Plant asked whether the McLoughlin plant would have sufficient excess capacity. Fairbairn told Plant, “We have the highest level of confidence that under a low, medium, high population growth scenario, this plant will have adequate capacity for a minimum of 20 years…It can be very difficult for a non-technical person, such as myself, to understand. That’s why we do have to rely upon the expert opinions of firms like Stantec, as well as on the years of expertise with your staff.” Fairbairn’s response ignored the advice Stantec had given the Seaterra Commission in 2013. Its expert opinion then was: “At an increased growth rate of 2.1 percent, the plant capacity is reached much sooner by the year 2018…To cope with the high growth rate scenario, CEP operation would most likely be implemented to maintain adequate capacity until 2040.” Now Fairbairn was claiming Stantec’s expert opinion was that, under any population growth scenario, capacity would last “for a minimum of 20 years.” For clarity, the organic loading capacity of the plant referred to by Stantec in 2013—35,000 kilograms per day—was exactly the same as the plant Fairbairn was referring to. Various documents authored by Stantec and other consultants show the critical limiting design factor for a McLoughlin plant is organic loading—referred to by wastewater engineers as biochemical oxygen demand—not hydraulic flow. Stantec’s 2013 projection that peak organic loading in Victoria’s sewers could reach McLoughlin’s limited design capacity by 2018 was based on a population growth projection of 2.1 percent per year. At a growth rate of half that (lower than the CRD is currently using for its projections), Stantec’s arithmetic shows the McLoughlin plant could run out of capacity by 2023. That date is within a few years of the CRD’s hoped-for completion date of 2020. Bird and Fairbairn did not respond to requests from Focus for information. The CRD refused to answer questions related to McLoughlin’s capacity limitations. CRD directors have been told that CEPT would be employed during significant “wet weather events,” but they have never been told—in public—that its regular use could be needed as early as 2018 as a result of the plant’s capacity being exceeded. Yet Mavinic’s 2014 concern that CEPT chemicals create sludge that “you can’t do anything with” seems to have been incorporated in the Project Board’s two recommended options for dealing with McLoughlin’s sludge. Both options included perpetual storage of the sludge in “biocell reactors,” which would be, essentially, permanent hills of toxic poop composting beside Willis Point Road, waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them. Residents in the area worried about the impact of the piles on air and groundwater quality will have to hope that a safe way to dispose of the sludge will be found one day. The Project Board only suggested they could be “mined” for a “beneficial use” once such a use had been discovered. The evidence indicates, then, that three vitally important pieces of information about a plant at McLoughlin Point were hidden by CRD staff from both elected officials and the public while the community evaluated other site locations: Its very limited excess capacity; the consequent need for ongoing use of CEPT soon after it is completed; and how CEPT limits what can be done with the sludge produced by the plant. Obscuring of these facts continues. THERE ARE TWO OTHER CONCERNS arising from McLoughlin’s limited capacity that have also been kept out of view by the CRD: First, how McLoughlin’s small size limited what treatment technology could be used there; and second, the huge additional cost that will result from the need to provide additional capacity using a system of decentralized treatment plants. Let’s look at the former first. The same 2009 peer review that judged McLoughlin to be “extremely small” questioned the CRD’s initial choice of membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology for secondary treatment and suggested the CRD assess biological aerated filter (BAF) technology as well. That’s the secondary treatment process the CRD eventually chose and, in 2013, the Seaterra Commission, in its “pointed questions” start-up phase, asked for an explanation of that choice. Stantec engineer Dr Bob Dawson’s reply to the Seaterra Commission described the physical process involved in a BAF plant, and he made a number of observations. Dawson wrote, “BAFs are relatively recent proprietary systems developed in Europe over the last 15 to 20 years and have been gradually introduced into North America over the last 10 years—a similar development timeline as membrane processes.” But if the technology was so new—Wikipedia calls it an “emerging technology”—then why would the CRD risk using it in Victoria? That’s covered by a second observation made by Dawson: “[BAF] is particularly applicable for locations where there is limited space for construction of a plant…” In other words, McLoughlin Point’s tiny size dictated the use of a highly compact form of treatment for which there was a very short track record. So what is the experience with BAF in Europe, where it has been used for five or ten years longer than in North America? Here’s what AECOM engineers who were making a comparison of wastewater treatment technology options for Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, in 2014, said about BAF: “Biological Aerated Filters are not recommended for consideration due to the associated high capital and operational costs. Generally, BAF technology produces effluents with very low suspended solid concentrations. However, after backwash cycles, this can deteriorate resulting in poorer quality effluent, which will reduce the effectiveness of the UV disinfection plant.” AECOM, by the way, is the global wastewater engineering company that’s one of three partners in Harbour Resource Partners. That’s the consortium that won the contract to build a BAF plant at McLoughlin Point in 2014, a contract recently resurrected by the Project Board. So, because of McLoughlin Point’s tiny size, Victoria is getting an apparently problematic treatment technology that, compared to more proven technologies, has higher capital and operating costs. Stantec’s explanation of BAF technology to the Seaterra Commission included information about the filter bed media utilized by the process. Stantec’s memo contained a photograph of expanded polystyrene beads, the filter media used, for example, in one of the few other BAF plants in Canada at Kingston’s Ravensview treatment plant. Polystyrene beads are a soft, friable plastic and since the polystyrene filter bed would be eroded over time by the effluent passing through it—especially if it contains fine, gritty precipitate introduced by CEPT—one can easily imagine a BAF plant being a perpetual source of microplastics flowing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When asked by Focus what filter-bed medium would be used at McLoughlin, Stantec replied, “The filter media for the BAF has not been selected yet as design is not complete.” The contract, however, has been awarded and the CRD would have no real control over what filter bed media is used. A search of CRD records indicates Stantec’s August 2013 explanation of BAF technology to the Seaterra Commission was never shared by CRD staff with elected officials at an open, public meeting. NOW LET’S LOOK AT how McLoughlin’s small size will lead to a system of decentralized treatment plants and huge additional costs. Stantec’s 2013 warning to the Seaterra Commission about the site’s limited capacity to accommodate future population growth in the region offered a mitigating strategy—the ongoing use of CEPT. But there’s another solution that would avoid the use of CEPT—building a second treatment plant at a different location. That strategy is actually incorporated in the CRD’s current Liquid Waste Management Plan. CRD staff have said, in several reports, that a second plant should be built in the West Shore because that’s “where most of the growth is occurring.” I’ll show later that this prognostication is demonstrably incorrect, but first consider how the strategy of building a second plant at a different location completely contradicts what the CRD has been saying all along about economy of scale. If a second plant location could be avoided, wouldn’t taxpayers stand to save many millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of dollars on capital, operating and borrowing costs? That had always been the position of CRD staff and pro-McLoughlin politicians when they were dismissing the idea of distributed treatment plants as being uneconomical compared to a single plant at McLoughlin. Indeed, the Project Board’s final report states that splitting McLoughlin’s capacity between two plants would increase the capital cost by $245 million. So, by the Project Board’s own reckoning, decentralization would have increased capital costs by 32 percent. That, in turn, would result in higher borrowing costs. Presumably, operating costs would be higher as well. Paradoxically, then, although the Project Board’s report confirms there is a very high cost that comes with a decentralized system, its choice of McLoughlin Point guarantees that Victoria will get a decentralized system—and the higher costs. Once McLoughlin’s capacity has been reached, what would an additional plant cost? The Urban Systems-Carollo options analyses, done earlier this year as part of the 18-month-long consideration of optional sites, estimated that by 2030 an additional $250 to $310 million would need to be spent for additional capacity. That estimate didn’t include additional conveyancing costs, which would likely add another $100 million. So with McLoughlin Point as the first step in a decentralized system, the experts are predicting additional costs of $350 to $410 million by 2030. It’s noteworthy that an outlook to 2030, as was included in the Urban Systems-Carollo analyses, doesn’t appear anywhere in the Project Board’s final report, and isn’t reflected in its estimates of cost per household. What’s readily apparent from the engineers’ estimates of the high cost of decentralization and the high cost of additional capacity is that a single expandable treatment plant could save the community hundreds of millions of dollars in capital costs compared to two widely-separated treatment plants located at McLoughlin Point and in Colwood or Langford. To save those hundreds of millions, though, a site larger than McLoughlin Point would have needed to be available. As we know, such a site is available—at Rock Bay. Yet the Project Board’s comparison of McLoughlin with Rock Bay gave not one iota of value to Rock Bay’s ability to accommodate expansion far into the future. This, too, is extraordinary. The Rock Bay site is 2.7 times larger than McLoughlin. Stantec’s rudimentary positioning of a treatment plant at Rock Bay for the Project Board’s report shows just how much of the Rock Bay site was left unused. That room for expansion would have completely eliminated the costly and environmentally-problematic reliance on CEPT “to maintain adequate capacity.” That advantage, too, was given zero value by the Project Board. It’s also possible that Rock Bay is large enough to accommodate a form of treatment that has lower capital and operating costs than BAF. The Project Board’s comparison of McLoughlin Point with Rock Bay used essentially the same BAF plant on both locations. That must have made for an easy comparison of cost (they should be close to equal), but did Stantec consider a technology with lower capital and operating costs for the much larger site at Rock Bay? It claims, without providing any evidence, that Rock Bay wasn’t large enough to accommodate conventional activated sludge technology. But the new Lions Gate plant in North Vancouver will be sited on a smaller parcel of land than Rock Bay, will be able to process a greater liquid load than the McLoughlin plant, has enough room for on-site anaerobic digesters—and uses lower-cost activated sludge treatment. It’s expected to be expandable to meet the needs of the North Shore well past 2100. While Fairbairn advised Plant to rely on “the expert opinions of firms like Stantec,” the expert opinions of Stantec have had a habit of selectively disappearing into the bowels of the CRD. Is there a memo somewhere in those depths explaining why Stantec never looked very hard at options other than a BAF plant at McLoughlin Point? LET'S BACK UP TO CONSIDER THE CRD'S PLAN to build a second treatment plant in either Colwood or Langford. If you think this is unlikely, or not particularly imminent, consider this: When CRD directors voted to go ahead with a treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, they also committed to spend $2 million on initial planning for a second treatment plant in Colwood. Why would the Project Board have made this recommendation if, as Fairbairn put it, “under a low, medium, high population growth scenario, [McLoughlin] will have adequate capacity for a minimum of 20 years…”? The Project Board, CRD staff and Stantec know that building a plant at McLoughlin Point with limited capacity for future growth means the development of a plan for a second plant needs to start immediately, and that’s what the CRD is doing. The extra business is obviously good for Stantec, but why would the CRD prefer that course instead of choosing Rock Bay, where hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars could be saved by avoiding a decentralized system? The Project Board claimed a plant at Rock Bay would cost $155 million more than one at McLoughlin. Much of that difference is in the higher cost of land at Rock Bay. The Project Board said the cost difference was “material,” meaning significant, but it didn’t give any material value to the highly valuable room for expansion at Rock Bay. No, the relatively small difference in capital cost doesn’t explain the Project Board’s choice of McLoughlin over Rock Bay. If Rock Bay had won out over McLoughlin, that could have been construed as a professional and political defeat for all those CRD staff and elected officials who have insisted that the $80 million spent on planning and 10 years of talking had correctly identified McLoughlin as the best location. With careers in the balance, McLoughlin was the emotional favourite. Other than that, though, there doesn’t appear to be any real justification for the choice. In fact, when the question of why the CRD would choose to put a second plant in Colwood is examined carefully, it becomes clear that a third plant—likely located in Victoria—will be needed in about 20 years. Even though Colwood and Langford contribute little more than seven percent of the current wastewater load, the CRD plans to put a second plant there anyway. Why? The CRD’s rationale is based on an out-of-date belief that “most of the growth is occurring” there. But over the last six years this belief has proven to be a delusion. The CRD’s own figures show that the increase in the number of people living in the “Core” municipalities has been almost twice that of Langford and Colwood combined. Moreover, when all sewage-generating development is considered—residential, commercial, institutional and industrial—the wrong-headedness of the CRD’s strategy is even more evident. Over the past 6 years, based on the value of building permits issued in each municipality, the core has seen 2.5 times as much growth in long-term wastewater-producing development as Langford and Colwood. The vast majority of that growth is occurring in Victoria and Saanich. Witness the numerous construction cranes in the Downtown core right now. There is nothing like this happening in Langford and Colwood. This recent reversal in the focus and form of development, from the suburbs to urban cores, from low density to high density, is taking place elsewhere in North America, including in cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Inevitable changes in public policy around energy, housing and transportation in response to the threat of climate change and ocean acidification will accelerate this phenomenon. As a result of the CRD’s miscalculation of where most growth will occur, putting a limited-capacity plant at McLoughlin and planning for a second plant in the West Shore will put taxpayers in jeopardy of having to pay for three plants. There’s two reasons for that. First, a second plant on the West Shore won’t be able to serve future growth in Saanich and Victoria without a hugely-expensive reconstruction of the sewer trunks. That’s never going to happen. Secondly, after a plant is built in Colwood or Langford, the small portion (about seven percent) of McLoughlin’s capacity that would be freed up would soon be gobbled up by growth in Victoria and Saanich. So, 20 years from now, Victorians will be looking for a third treatment site—one that will have to be located in either Victoria or Saanich, where most of the region’s growth is occurring. Where will it go? Clover Point is a likely candidate. If the cost of decentralization—going from one to two plants—is about 30 percent of the project cost, as the Project Board’s numbers indicate, what would be the additional cost of building three plants instead of one? Forty percent? Fifty percent? A far more logical, less expensive alternative would have been to put one central plant at Rock Bay—followed by incremental expansion of capacity there as required. The remediated contaminated site at Rock Bay was identified during extensive public consultation as the location for treatment most preferred by the public. Its First Nations owners were eager to sell. The site is already surrounded by industrial operations that provide essential building materials for constructing a city—gravel, concrete, asphalt and beer—businesses that are unlikely to go away in the future. The location was also supported by the mayors of Victoria and Esquimalt. In spite of all those strong positives, the previously rejected McLoughlin site magically became the recommended option—even though it wasn’t even part of the recent 18-month-long consideration of options. But wait…by not being on the table, the CRD avoided examination of any of McLoughlin’s strong negatives (see above). THE CRD HAS HIDDEN FROM THE PUBLIC many significant aspects of this project: McLoughlin’s limited capacity, the need for the use of CEPT, the way in which CEPT would restrict what could be done with the sewage sludge, the known problems with BAF technology, the need for—and cost of—additional capacity, including the certainty of a second plant and the likelihood of a third plant. Yet the provincial Environmental Management Act allows the CRD to proceed with its flawed plan without the need for elector consent through a referendum. In ordinary circumstances, such issues as I’ve outlined here would have been hashed out in public by opposing sides in a referendum. A citizen’s right to be asked by a municipal government for permission to borrow large sums of money to provide that citizen a service is a basic right in Canada. The Environmental Management Act takes that right away in the case of implementing a Liquid Waste Management Plan. But the Province’s published guidelines promise that electors will be “adequately” consulted. Given the circumstances I’ve described above, there is grave doubt that consultation has been adequate. With the failure of Victoria’s political representatives to address these issues— they, too, have been kept largely in the dark—do Victoria electors have any avenue through the courts? I outlined these issues to Victoria lawyer John Alexander, a litigation partner with the law firm Cox Taylor. I noted the EMA’s promise of adequate consultation and asked Alexander if there was any avenue for a judicial review of the Province’s expected approval of the CRD’s McLoughlin-based Liquid Waste Management Plan (LWMP). Alexander replied, “From a legal perspective, the question would be stated: Does the Province’s published non-statutory consultation requirement create a legitimate expectation that an Order imposing a LWMP would not be made without consultation?” Alexander pointed to a 1990 Supreme Court of Canada ruling which states, in part, “[the doctrine of legitimate expectations] is simply an extension of the rules of natural justice and procedural fairness. It affords a party affected by the decision of the public official an opportunity to make representations in circumstances in which there otherwise would be no such opportunity. The court supplies the omission where, based on the conduct of the public official, a party has been led to believe that his or her rights would not be affected without consultation.” “In other words,” Alexander wrote, “the court sets aside the decision on the basis that [it was] as if some required procedural step was not properly taken.” Focus readers interested in supporting a legal challenge of the Province’s approval of the CRD’s plan for McLoughlin Point can express that support by contacting us at 250-388-7231, email at focuspublish@shaw.ca, or by using the "Contact Us" form on this website. If a legal challenge is organized by Victoria electors, Focus will connect you with the organizers of that challenge. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine. https://www.focusonvictoria.ca/forums-page