BC megaprojects: over budget and behind, every time

"When you look at major project infrastructure delivery in B.C., every single project is over budget and behind schedule." That is the construction industry's own association in 2024, naming Site C, the Pattullo Bridge, and the Broadway Subway in one breath.^⁠[1]

The pattern, project by project

The Pattullo Bridge replacement: four lanes replacing four lanes. When major construction began in 2021 the target was late 2023, and the cost has risen from $1.38 billion to $1.64 billion.^⁠[2] It fully opened on February 14, 2026, more than two years late.^⁠[3]

Surrey's mayor called replacing a four-lane bridge with a four-lane bridge "shortsighted," with 61,000 vehicles a day crossing it and her city near 700,000 people.^⁠[4]

The Broadway Subway was sold at $2.8 billion with a 2025 opening. The cost has crept to $2.95 billion,^⁠[5] and the opening now sits in fall 2027, two years late.^⁠[6] And it stops at Arbutus Street, well short of UBC. The extension to campus is still waiting on federal and provincial funding that has not been committed.^⁠[7] UBC's own estimate: on opening day, "almost 4,000 passengers per peak hour will be left waiting for overcrowded buses to get to and from campus."^⁠[8]

The Surrey Langley SkyTrain jumped from about $4 billion to $6 billion before the hardest construction had even started. It is projected to complete in late 2029, already a year later than first promised.^⁠[9] Given every other project on this list, who knows when it really will.

Site C carries the whole story in one project. Horgan declared in 2017 that it "should never have been started" while continuing it at $10.7 billion.^⁠[10] By 2021 it was $16 billion.^⁠[11] It finished within that revised budget and generates power BC badly needs.^⁠[12] Then Eby named it after Horgan, the premier who fought it.^⁠[13] The dam was right all along. The NDP's decade of hostility to it is the point.

Site C produces about 5,100 gigawatt hours a year, enough to power about 450,000 homes or 1.7 million electric vehicles.^⁠[14] This same government requires that 75% of new cars sold in BC be zero-emission by 2035.^⁠[15] Electric cars need clean power to charge. You cannot mandate them while fighting the dam that powers them.

Ferries from a Chinese state shipyard

In June 2025, BC Ferries gave the contract for four major vessels to a Chinese state-owned shipyard. No Canadian yard bid, and the federal transport minister wrote of her "consternation and disappointment."^⁠[16] Eby called the deal not his "preferred outcome" and let it stand.^⁠[17]

Ottawa's Canada Infrastructure Bank backed the deal with a $1-billion loan guarantee.^⁠[18] A report for a coalition of BC shipbuilding unions and industry estimates that building the four ships at home would have produced $1.5 billion in economic activity, more than 10,000 job-years, and $413 million in government revenue.^⁠[19]

The report concedes BC's existing yards could not have met the same schedule.^⁠[19] That is the case for building shipyard capacity years ago, when this government first knew the fleet was ageing.

Fifteen months later, days before calling the election, he pledged that future ferries would be built at home.^⁠[20] The four ships are still being built in China.

And when the bill arrives, stop building

In February 2026 the government suspended construction of seven long-term care homes, in Abbotsford, Campbell River, Chilliwack, Delta, Fort St. John, Kelowna, and Squamish, because the price had reached $1.8 million per bed, up from about $800,000 six years earlier.^{⁠[21]⁠[22]}

Meanwhile 7,212 seniors are on the waitlist for a care bed, waiting an average of 290 days.^⁠[21] Vaughn Palmer's summary of the record: huge cost increases on the NDP's watch, then a halt.^⁠[22]

The Cowichan hospital replacement went from $887 million to $1.45 billion before it was half built.^⁠[23] The province now calls it a $1.4-billion project, due to open in mid-2027.^⁠[24]

The George Massey crossing, cancelled as a funded bridge in 2017, is now an $8.5-billion tunnel with no main construction started.^⁠[25] The full story is in our article on the Massey bridge.

None of this is weather. Cancel, shrink, re-tender, delay, and pay more for less: these are choices, made over nine years, by the same people now asking to be trusted with a debt headed past $235 billion.