Culvert Chronicles

I work for multiple clients.  Normally I do not speak specifically about anything I do for them on my blog because I do not want anything I say to impact on my clients.  Today will be an exception.  For the last several weeks I have been involved with something that perfectly illustrates how dysfunctional Canada has become.

I work part time for a small company that owns, among other things, a short gravel road.  In August a government inspector checked the road and found a culvert in need of repair.  The company received a letter informing them that the culvert must be repaired.  It is my job to handle day-to-day operations, so I called our road maintenance contractor.  He went out to inspect the culvert and provided an estimate.  $5000 to fix the culvert but he also recommended another $2000 to recontour the ditch.  He advised me he could start immediately.

I contacted the Government inspector to give them repair details and told them we would start and finish the job the following day.  The inspector told me that I can’t do that because the dry ditch on both sides of that culvert has been designated as a waterway by another government department.  My client cannot do any repairs before a biologist confirms there are no fish living in the dry ditch.

I contacted an environmental company to do the required study.  One week later I received a 13-page report confirming that there are no fish living in the dry ditch.  The story does not end with a useless report, however.  Part of the report was a repair procedure and an obligation to notify the government 2 weeks prior to any work starting.

I gave the repair procedure to my road contractor, and he advised me the Cadillac price of $7,000 he had given me won’t cover what the environmentalist wants done.  The price is now $13,000.  I want to step back for a moment to drive that home.  By regulations I cannot use the recommendations of a contractor who builds roads and has installed thousands of culverts.  I must instead follow the recommendations of an environmental company that does nothing other than sell expensive reports to people who are forced by the government to purchase them.  By following the advice of someone who has never built a road or installed a culvert my repair costs have increased by 86%.  Remember that cost does not include the cost of the 13-page report clarifying that fish do not live on dry land.

The culvert is still not repaired because my client has yet to complete the necessary 2-week notification.  No one, including the government, was certain how this should be done.  Our company administrator has been wading through the regulations and continues to discover more forms that must be filled out.  Forms that largely contain the same information that she has already provided in previous forms.

We are now 9 weeks into this farce, and the costs will have more than doubled once we get invoiced for our 13-page dry ditch fish report.  This is happening in what is considered the most business-friendly province in Canada.  Canada is broken.  It was broken by professional politicians and a bureaucracy that finds ways to make ordinary activities like fixing a culvert expensive and time consuming.  There is no way to fix this short of firing everyone and starting over with people who possess at least a drop of common sense.  Sadly, that is as unlikely as finding fish in a dry ditch.