Yeah it happens a lot here as well. It goes into contractors pocket who dig/drill/build -> stop -> dig/drill/build -> stop and get their $$ on partially completed work and milk the system for all it will give them. Quite often they are friends/relatives of the politicians.

Well, in this case, the problem is more so that money wasn’t spent on large swaths of the project.

Idk about Canada, but what you usually see in the UK is that tens of millions of pounds get spend before a single brick is laid.

Money disappears into consultations, reviews, studies and reports of dubious value, the paperwork keeps piling up and it takes years before the public sees anything tangible, if the project ever gets built at all.

Someone somewhere is getting very rich off this, but it ain't the taxpayer.

Tens of millions?

£1.2 BILLION before a single spade in the ground for the lower thames crossing

https://www.ft.com/content/917d4b7f-318e-46fe-ba44-664551ebc...

The planning document alone was 350,000 pages long, and cost about £1000 per page (£350m).

What western countries lack is someone empowered enough to just say "fuck it, make it happen", and be held accountable once it's built.

How did France and Spain build their high speed rail?

I would guess less institutionalised corruption and less weight put on planning objections.

The term in the 20th century was honest graft.

Here in the EU, we usually consider Italy and Spain somewhat more corrupt than the Western average, but high-speed rail in both countries got built reliably and without major delays.

Even though both peninsulas are mountainous, by no means an easy terrain.

I wonder if low level corruption on €1m projects means there's no room in the market for high level corruption.

California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systematic underbidding + cost overruns is the rule, and is expected by all parties except the naive public.

Couple that with the kind of "Build nothing if any single problem can be detacted", 'Cheems mindset' failures of liberalism, and high-pressure demands from a federal government whose legislators are eager to sabotage projects outside of purple states.

https://normielisation.substack.com/p/cheems-mindset

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo

Here in the UK all Gov tenders are on a combination of price and quality - typically 40-60% quality. If you want a long term relationship as a Gov supplier, you need to demonstrate quality and bid the pricing fairly, without chronic underpinning.