(Quebec) Poor inspections and inadequate needs assessment by the Ministry of Transportation have caused the bill for the Louis Hippolyte-La Fontaine Tunnel repair project to skyrocket.
Published at 8:40 am.
This is the conclusion reached by the Public Procurement Authority (AMP), the contract management regulator established on the recommendation of the Charbonneau Commission, following an investigation.
The AMP published a report on its audit of the Department for Transport’s contract management on Wednesday. It focused on the maintenance of important structures such as the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel (Montreal-Montérégie-Est) and the Papineau-Leblanc bridges (Montreal-Laval), the Île-aux-Tourtes (Montréal-Montérégie-Ouest ) and Pierre-Laporte (Québec-Lévis).
Overall, the AMP identified a number of “gaps,” including:
- Poor planning of maintenance work
- Lack of monitoring of reports to ensure the sustainability of the infrastructure
- Reactive rather than proactive management, leading to the use of over-the-counter contingency contracts, which are more expensive
- Inadequate monitoring of work execution.
“These deficiencies mean in particular that the ministry does not carry out the necessary work in a timely manner, which means that maintenance work is not subject to strict planning adapted to the respective infrastructure,” estimates the AMP.
Quebec must award contracts without emergency tendering if adequate inspections and regular maintenance have not been carried out. This was particularly the case at the Papineau-Leblanc bridges when maintaining the stay cables and at Pierre-Laporte when maintaining the suspension bridges. “This leaves the Ministry in a situation where it has to award contracts by mutual agreement, citing reasons of urgency, or resort to other contractual instruments for its works given the challenges of planning and managing projects. »
In the case of the maintenance of the Île-aux-Tourtes bridge, the ministry largely underestimated the amount of mortar required and, moreover, ignored the 35 notices indicating that the contractor did not comply with the manufacturer’s standards in the production of the mortar.
The Fall of the Tunnel
In August 2022, the Legault government announced that the structure of the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel, which is currently being repaired, is much more damaged than expected. As a result, the cost of the project exploded by a billion dollars to 2.5 billion.
The safe was more damaged than expected. “This is the kind of deterioration that we can only measure once the work has started and that we cannot accurately predict,” explained then Transport Minister François Bonnardel.
However, the AMP believes that adequate inspections would have enabled the problem to be identified. She adds that the bill also rose because the ministry had not previously conducted tests to guide its decisions on certain materials, which proved inadequate. A test bench was only carried out when the work was already underway – too late, according to AMP.
“A better assessment of needs would have allowed for better planning of works, significant savings and better management of public funds,” she writes. She adds: “From the point of view of sound management of public resources, a more thorough assessment of needs before the start of work, through preliminary tests of the selected materials and timely inspections, would have made it possible to better anticipate the problems related to the management of these aspects of the project and its economic and logistical consequences. »
As part of its review, the AMP analyzed more than 2,500 contracts and met with more than 200 stakeholders – ministry officials, contractors, managers and engineers.