1 year since wastewater project price jumped by $3B, critics demand answers from Metro Vancouver
Posted March 19, 2025 12:39 pm.
Last Updated March 19, 2025 3:04 pm.
It was a year ago this week that Metro Vancouver announced a massive cost overrun for the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Project, with the price tag ballooning from around $700 million to $3.86 billion.
The facility is supposed to replace the Lions Gate Wastewater Treatment Plant, which has been operating since the 1960s and is out of service life.
In March last year, the regional district announced the price jump after it was forced to switch contractors.
New Westminster city Coun. Daniel Fontaine says since then, there has been no clear answer about what went wrong and no independent public inquiry.
“We still have no answers regarding the North Shore wastewater treatment plant in terms of what went wrong. We have got no Auditor General’s review. We don’t have an independent public inquiry. We have an inquiry and a review that’s being driven and controlled by Metro Vancouver,” Fontaine explained.
“So there still remains some significant answers that need to be provided to the public around this massive infrastructure project that went into the financial ditch.”
At this point, Fontaine is asking for the provincial government to intervene, but he says Premier David Eby is “dithering” rather than taking action.
“They’ve had, over the past year, multiple opportunities to step in and to fix this, and the province of British Columbia has chosen not to do that,” Fontaine claimed.
Metro Vancouver says it’s doing an independent audit of what went wrong with the project, but Acciona, the company originally hired to work on the plant, is suing the district.
In January, Burnaby Mayor and district board chair Mike Hurley said Metro Vancouver had filed a counterclaim.
Fontaine says the public too needs to put pressure on the province and the regional district for more transparency.
“Twelve months of various media reports around inappropriate spending, wasteful spending, poor governance, dysfunction… unfortunately, that’s what marks this organization right now, with no end in sight to that.”
