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The Nipigon Bridge over the Nipigon River was opened in November 2015. The $106 million bridge is the first cable-stayed on the Trans-Canada and is the only 17/11 east-west route for one-hundred-million-dollar-a-day transportation of goods between western and eastern Canada.
After 9/11, vital infrastructure was identified to government. In a cascading effort to save money, the federal government passed the task of creating a strategy for maintaining transportation to the provinces. Ontario passed the task in the Nipigon River area to the Town of Nipigon.
The town has some three thousand inhabitants with no training to create a strategy. There is no strategy!
The building of the cable-stayed bridge was a joint company, BOT Construction, a Spanish company and Ferrovial Agroman, an Ontario company.
Because BOT had a good record of building bridges of this design, it was awarded the contract to build the new Nipigon bridge.
This is where false economy kicked in. Ontario took the checking of the quality of work away from trained Ministry of Transport and gave BOT the checking of their own work. Their experience was all in Spanish climatic conditions. There are different such conditions in Northern Ontario. Steel bolts to hold the cables to the bed of the bridge failed when temperatures dropped to ten dregrees below freezing. The MTO inspectors knew from the beginning the bridge would fail. The government was informed of this annually for ten years. Instead of heeding the warnings the bureaucrats insisted, "It is not going to happen. Relax!"
Well, guess what? It happened.
Suddenly the one-hundred-million-dollar-a-day flow of goods came to a standstill.
Crossing the border is controlled by a system with astronomical cost. To make the situation worse, the route is too long for livestock to be be given required rest stops for feeding and water. That commerce is stalled.
If Canadians had used the ten years to build a second road with a bridge all this would have been a daily news report. We didn't do it!
The day after 9/11 the American government identified likely sites vulnerable to attack. The American Corps of Engineers were dispatched to build a replacement bridge beside such a bridge in Northern Ontario. In less than a day they built a parallel bridge. It was to be a joint Canadian-American effort. Canada had no contingency plan. A pickup truck came over a hill with a couple of shovels and some rocks in it to watch the Americans drive ashore!
Want another example of Canadian ignorance of its own geography? A request came for inspection of a site proposed for a new observation tower in Northern Ontario, report in one day. Bill Opsoomer, a pilot with the North-West OPP patrol thought it was a joke. It was no joke! There was no place to land at the site to conduct the required inspection. They would have to land at a site below and cut their way to the location. Six days a the least.
Another brilliant idea to cut costs: retire the work-horse Turbo Beavers and send in two ultralites to take over. Ultralites! They would have flown into oblivion never to be seen again!
With such ignorance, how do the wide-eyed dreamers hope to "build the kind of Canada" they envision?
Listen! Do you hear the world laughing at us?