Mr. Speaker, in the Trans Mountain response to Canada Energy Regulator information request no.1 on August 16, 2023, five key categories of root causes of cost increases were presented. Cost increases can take many forms, but regarding delay costs, specific examples of delays are given below for each root cause.
For evolving and additional compliance requirements, delays were driven by legal and regulatory requirements beyond the execution plan.
For information maturity, delays were driven by changes in the availability and accuracy of information to support expansion project planning.
For indigenous accommodations, delays were driven by changes to support and accommodate the concerns of indigenous communities.
For stakeholder engagement, delays occurred in securing access to the right-of-way and construction workspaces, including the acquisition of land rights.
For exogenous factors, delays were driven by external events and acts of God impacting the execution of the expansion project that were outside of Trans Mountain’s control. These include but are not limited to extreme weather events, seasonal and severe wildfire seasons in British Columbia, and productivity losses from COVID-19 related to restrictions, outbreak stand downs and labour shortages.
Please note that in processing parliamentary returns, the Department of Finance applies the Privacy Act and the principles set out in the Access to Information Act, and certain information has been withheld on the grounds that the information constitutes third party information and commercial information.
In general, schedule delays can be either reoccurring, as they are tied to cyclical parts of construction such as bird nesting delays, archeological delays and permitting delays, or one time events such as weather events. Individual delays themselves may not cause serious cost impacts. However, multiple delays over time accumulate to larger costs. These events can also cause knock-on effects such as missed construction windows or can require construction teams to move to other areas, which results in a significant cost.
As a result of the reoccurring nature of many types of delays, multiple factors simultaneously contributing to delays, knock-on effects to other aspects of construction and construction occurring in parallel on multiple parts of the pipeline, it is difficult to attribute specific dates, costs and project level lengths of delay to the separate categories of delay.