Tom Mulcair: Quebec's latest big project can succeed. Here's how
Mobilité Infra Québec may go nowhere if the government insists on looking inward when trying to find the best minds.
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The recent proposal by Transport Minister Geneviève Guilbault to create a new government agency, Mobilité Infra Québec, to oversee major transportation infrastructure is an idea full of promise.
The list of mangled projects, broken promises and bungled deadlines includes the infamous “ third link” between Quebec City and its south shore, the ill-planned refurbishing of the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Bridge–Tunnel, and the incomprehensible failure to foresee the need to urgently replace the Île-aux-Tourtes Bridge. It also includes a $2.7 billion (!) plan to rebuild a two-lane bridge to Île d’Orléans, population … 7,000.
The promised tramway for Quebec City, much like the REM to the east of Montreal, has never made it off the drawing board.
With successive failures like that, this agency has to succeed. But, like the new health agency, Santé Québec, which is also an inspired idea, it may never get out of the starting blocks if Quebec insists on looking inward when trying to find the best.
This applies in spades for a Quebec City minister like Guilbault. She is likely to plead that the necessary “national vision” for projects will require that Mobilité Infra Québec be based in the provincial capital. Instead of a “national vision,” unfortunately, it risks becoming a parochial vision with little chance of success. Because the problems that need addressing are in Quebec’s largest city, Montreal.
Montreal also has the ability to retain and attract world calibre talent. No slight intended to Quebec City, where I lived and worked for many years. It’s a magnificent city, but if you’re bringing together the most exceptional people for a big project in New York state, you’re not going to convince them to go to the state capital, Albany. You’ll have to set up shop in New York City. It’s the same thing here.
In Quebec, unlike Europe where upkeep and maintenance of infrastructure is routinely planned decades in advance, we seem to wait for things to fall down.
There is a crying need to bring together the best minds with the deepest experience to get us out of this quagmire, and that’s why this new agency holds such promise.
For it to succeed, however, Guilbault and Premier François Legault are going to have to do a lucid assessment of how we got into this intractable mess in the first place.
Does the name Macky Tall ring a bell?
Tall was a star in the Quebec investment firmament whose specialty — infrastructure — made him first among equals. His vision brought us the REM as president of CDPQ Infra, the Caisse de dépôt et placement’s transport subsidiary that is building the light rail network.
He was so far ahead of his peers that, according to well-informed sources at the time, he was touted over all other potential candidates to become the new head of the Caisse, Quebec’s pension fund.
The Mali-born and Quebec-university trained Tall was indeed in every respect a notch above every other candidate. He was apparently proposed by the Caisse’s own selection committee to replace outgoing CEO Michael Sabia.
For reasons known only to Legault and Pierre Fitzgibbon, his minister of the economy, innovation and energy, Tall was passed over for the job. They preferred a former banker, Charles Emond, whose performance can charitably be described as mediocre.
It wasn’t long before Tall accepted to join a major American firm, taking his skill, experience and expertise with him. Today he is a partner and chair of Carlyle’s Infrastructure Group, which includes major projects in transportation, renewables, energy, power and water. It has assets under management larger than those of the Caisse.
His is exactly the type of talent that has to be attracted if Mobilité Infra Québec is to succeed. If, instead, it is seen by Quebec City bureaucrats as an interesting way to escape the grind in the various ministries, it will be populated with the same folks who got us into the current mess. Not a very promising prospect.
Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest.
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