By Allison Tanner
Venue: Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre
The story of the Canada Line is “not typical of an infrastructure project,” Jane Bird, chief executive officer, Canada Line Rapid Transit Inc. told The Vancouver Board of Trade on receiving the Spirit of Vancouver® Outstanding Leadership Award; rather “it is exactly the opposite.”
At a lunch sponsored by Bull Housser & Tupper, Farris, Vaughan, Wills & Murphy LLP, Global Container Terminals and supporting sponsors KPMG and YVR, Bird recounted the story of how the Canada Line planning and construction.
The Vancouver Board of Trade officially welcomed the first Canada Line train at a Platform Party when the line opened on August 17, 2009 – three-and-a-half months early and under budget.
Bird opened her speech by thanking The Board for its early leadership role in getting the project off the ground. “It was the Board of Trade in fact and a group that they called the coalition, who stood up and said, ‘Wait a minute, we have and Airport Authority who is willing to support public transit, we have a billion dollars, we have a private sector that is prepared to work with us to invest in public transit in our region on a project that has been on the books since 1967? What are we thinking? We are going to let this opportunity pass us by?’ And we owe the Board of Trade, that coalition and the business community a debt of gratitude for standing up because without that we would have lost the project.”
The touch-and-go project survived many “dark and stormy nights,” and Bird explained how remarkable it is that the project took only eight years. From internal to political conflicts, Bird dealt with it all, and got to see the project lift-off when Vancouver Airport Authority signed on to be a partner. “The first money is always the hardest to get,” said Bird. Following suit was TransLink and the provincial and federal governments.
The next step was to retrieve an estimate for the project costs from the engineers. The initial estimate was “around $1.7 billion,” which mean asking sponsors for $300 million each, with the federal government promising $450 million, remarked Bird. With the financial structure set, digging began.
Bird discussed how the project relied on SNC Lavalin’s expertise by outlining what was needed rather than how to dig the tunnel and design the train, so they could choose the best solutions. After assessing the various risks, it was concluded that “the biggest problem was the underground.” The biggest risk factor was “what you think is in the ground and what is actually in the ground,” explained Bird. The problem was given to SNC to find a solution. When the tunnels finished early, it was a “happy ending to that chapter.”
The completion of the project marked the time to plan operations and maintenance of Canada Line. Transit BC and SNC Lavalin agreed to not only build it, but also operate and maintain it for 35 years. “It’s the first agreement of its kind in North America,” exclaimed Bird.
“The end of the story is, we have a community that likes Canada Line, the Airport Authority tells me their passengers like Canada Line,” with 98 per cent saying they would take it again, said Bird. “We had hoped to have 100,000 people ride Canada Line per day by 2011; last Friday 99,500 people rode Canada Line,” she announced.
Project partners then gathered on stage as Board of Trade managing director Darcy Rezac presented the Spirit of Vancouver Outstanding Leadership Award to Bird.