Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, Executive Chairman and co-founder of Oxford Global Projects, is an expert on megaproject management. He has written about proponents getting large undertakings approved by using “strategic misrepresentation” when they conjure up budgets.

The term is described in an Oxford journal:

Two examples involving British Columbia are ongoing as this is written. The closest to completion is the Trans Mountain; Expansion Project (TMX); the other is Site C. Between 2013 and 2024, the budget for the fossil fuel pipeline increased 530%; the Site C project increased 103%.

The current BC Government admitted to a huge cost increase at Site C in 2021 but has been silent ever since about the project’s budget.

The federal government began admitting to vast cost overruns for TMX in 2020, after construction was well underway. Since then, the TMX budget has been updated three times, with a promise of a final update in mid-summer 2024.

I have been assuming BC Hydro’s megaproject would cost about $20 billion. Based on the experience with TMX, the new Peace River Dam may cost far more.

But that’s only part of the story. Drought conditions in northeast British Columbia has BC Hydro worried about its ability to generate electricity in the quantities needed. I have heard an unconfirmed rumour that BC Hydro asked fossil gas companies to restart gas-fueled generators to feed the provincial grid.

Years ago, while ignoring energy storage options, putative experts in BC dismissed the idea of wind power, arguing that hydropower was reliable and dispatchable.

If executives at BC Hydro were willing to admit error, they would acknowledge that major installations of wind power with battery energy storage (BESS) would have been a better choice than the costly Peace River dam.

Freelance journalist Bob Mackin illustrates another example of strategic misrepresentation used to advance a costly project:

The cost of hosting seven FIFA World Cup 26 matches at B.C. Place Stadium could reach almost $600 million.

In an April 30 update, NDP Tourism, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Lana Popham revealed the budget has skyrocketed to between $483 million and $581 million. That represents an increase of 110% to 152% from the early 2023 estimate of $230 million.

It works out to between $69 million and $83 million per game...

A study on local, regional and national economic impacts of mega events by Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, found that many large sporting events “simply supplant, rather than supplement the regular tourist economy.”

“In other words, the economic impact of a mega-event may be large in a gross sense but the net impact may be small,” Matheson concluded.

In 2022, the provincial government said hosting of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Vancouver would cost between $240 million and $260 million. I suppose we should feel lucky the budget has only doubled. But then, there are still two years left to reveal additional costs.