Ok, let me rephrase. The short term solution to keep this train rolling is stern leadership. The long term solution would need to be actual legislative action!
However, that might not actually be necessary.
Checks and balances exist for a reason, but can be circumvented or ignored in dire/desperate times. One could argue that the PM "urging" a department (PSPC) to "go light" on their responsibilities and stay out of DIA's way is a form of circumventing checks and balances, but one that we only accept because of the tumultuous times we are facing. We don't WANT this way of doing business to be permanent. When things settle out, become more stable, become more prosperous, whatever, the appetite for someone cavalier will diminish and we will return to a more bureaucratic status quo. We can't do that if we've previous legislated a whole bunch of non bureaucratic powers to DIA.
Just a thought.
Haste can, in fact, result in waste though.
We don't want an approach similar to the one that built this thing
The Money Pit That Is Montreal’s Olympic Stadium
The Big Owe’s new roof will cost taxpayers nearly a billion dollars. Is it time to let the concrete relic die?
Montreal’s Olympic Stadium has been called any number of things—a big white elephant, a giant spaceship. But many locals know it as the Big Owe. The name refers to the hundreds of millions of dollars the vexed landmark has cost the province over the past three decades—to construct it, maintain it, repair it, overhaul it, and now (if the Coalition Avenir Québec government has its way)
slap a new roof on it.
Le Stade is undeniably a prized part of Montreal’s heritage and visual landscape. With its striking elliptical shape designed by French architect Roger Taillibert and featuring a 165-metre inclined tower that is the world’s tallest such structure, the building is best understood as a megalomaniacal bragging right. When the city beat Moscow and Los Angeles for the 1976 Olympics, then mayor Jean Drapeau boasted that the Games wouldn’t run a deficit. By the time the construction of the required facilities came to an end, the city had sunk thirteen times more money into the project than what was originally estimated, with the budget skyrocketing from $120 million to $1.7 billion. The stadium was responsible for much of those cost overruns.
It took Quebecers three decades to
pay off the debt. By the time the province signed the last cheque—in 2006—the Montreal Expos, who had moved into the concrete edifice after the Olympics, were two years into being the Washington Nationals. But there is something harder to pay down: the legacy of financial dereliction, criminality, and fraud surrounding the stadium (including, as
Building magazine
would claim, that a “job-site union boss would be shot dead in his car years later, likely a mob hit”). A series of corruption charges, and convictions, were brought against senior officials and contractors, with Drapeau’s management
criticized as incompetent and irresponsible. The Big Owe, with its ongoing maintenance issues, now serves as a cautionary tale of unchecked ambition and has had lasting repercussions on Montreal’s public projects and infrastructure development.
