Last month, the Alberta government announced that construction had begun on a $130.5 million continuing care centre in Calgary.
According to the announcement, the construction of the Bridgeland Riverside Continuing Care Centre will employ 520 construction and construction-related workers over the next 2.5 years or so.
What the announcement forgot to mention was that the 198-unit facility was actually announced by the NDP in March 2017. In fact, the 2017 budget outlined how much money would be allocated to the project per year:
| 2017–2018 | $2 million |
| 2018–2019 | $42 million |
| 2019–2020 | $67 million |
| 2020–2021 | $20 million |
| Total | $131 million |
Those numbers were adjusted in the 2018–2019 budget—the NDP’s last budget—extending the completion date by two years, just in time for the 2023 election:
| 2018–2019 | $10 million |
| 2019–2020 | $43 million |
| 2020–2021 | $40 million |
| 2021–2022 | $33 million |
| 2022–2023 | $5 million |
| Total | $130 million |
In the UCP’s first budget, the numbers were updated as follows:
| 2019–2020 | $3 million |
| 2020–2021 | $21 million |
| 2021–2022 | $30 million |
| 2022–2023 | $51 million |
| Total | $104 million |
Again in the 2020–2021 budget:
| 2020–2021 | $19 million |
| 2021–2022 | $40 million |
| 2022–2023 | $44 million |
| Total | $103 million |
And finally in the latest budget announced at the end of last month, with a completion date extension of yet one more year:
| 2021–2022 | $41 million |
| 2022–2023 | $43 million |
| 2023–2024 | $31 million |
| Total | $115 million |
So, a project that was originally to be completed by the end of this month—at the latest—has had two extensions that collectively pushed back the completion date by 3 years, nearly doubling the original project timeline.
And it’s not even clear whether the government will end up paying the $130.5 million for the project that had been announced in 2017.
For example, look at the first two projections: $131 million and $130 million. The first project proposed $2 million being spent in the first year of the project. Did they spend that much that year? If so, shouldn’t the project cost be $129 million in the following budget?
Or the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 budgets: one is $104 million and the other is $103 million. The government was supposed to spend $3 million in 2019–2020, but the following year, the project costs dropped by only $1 million.
And then all of a sudden, the project jumps up $12 million in this year’s budget to $115 million. Which leaves me wondering whether we’ve spent only $15 million over the last 4 years or the final project will end up costing more.
Or did we try shaving nearly $25 million off the project price for the last two years and realize that there was no way that would be possible?
