B.C.Michael Campbell ( Premier Gordon Campbells brother)
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
My observation is that even the harshest critics of the gun registry don't get the real problem, and certainly those that support it don't want to.
Many of us may be aware that it qualifies as one of the worst-run programs in Canadian history. In summing up the sentiments of the audit team, federal gun control adviser Professor William Stenning declared that, "They just couldn't believe their eyes. They've seen lots of terrible things, but they've never seen anything like this."
But the point being missed is that the money blown in the gun registry goes beyond incompetence. You simply can't get from estimates of $2 million to expenditures of over $1 billion solely through mismanagement. This fact has barely rated a mention because I suspect that too many of us simply don't appreciate the significance of the numbers.
For example, software engineer Tony Olekshy has a wonderful illustration detailing the problem. Originally, the database was projected to cost $1 million, but even allowing for an underestimation in the magnitude of 1,000 per cent (or $10 million), the results are unfathomable.
Imagine if a private business had a $10-million contract and presented a bill for $30 million instead. Do you think the customer would be angry? What if that bill was three times higher again, at $90 million?
What if it grew by another factor of three, to $270 million, and then did it again? According to the CBC and other news organizations, the gun registry database cost $750 million. It cost 3-times-3-times-3-times-3-times the original estimate, which we allowed to be 1,000 per cent above the government's original forecast.
To put that number into perspective, imagine you and your spouse planned on having two children, but instead ending up with 162. In the same way you can't legitimately come up with 162 children, the gun registry database can't legitimately cost $750 million. I emphasize the word "legitimately."
Given the project has taken eight years, that works out to $250,000 per day, every day, of each of those eight years. I have found nobody familiar with that kind of project in the private sector who has the faintest idea as to how that can happen. It works out to $94 million per year for eight years, simply to run a database. In other words, every four days for eight years they spent the equivalent of the total original estimate of $1 million.
As Olekshy points out, it simply can't take the equivalent of 7,500-man years to build a gun-registry database for three million owners. The point is that bad management alone can't produce overruns like we've paid for.
Anywhere else there would be lawsuits, but we haven't even been treated to Paul Martin reminding us he's as mad as we are about this. No threat to "get to the bottom of this." No public inquiry. Yet the problem in financial terms is more significant.
Corporations get sued for cost overruns on the order of tens of per cent. Even starting with our generous estimation of $10 million, the database it is now 7,500 per cent over budget.
Hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars have disappeared and anyone familiar with numbers will understand that gross mismanagement alone cannot explain what has happened.
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, March 02, 2004
My observation is that even the harshest critics of the gun registry don't get the real problem, and certainly those that support it don't want to.
Many of us may be aware that it qualifies as one of the worst-run programs in Canadian history. In summing up the sentiments of the audit team, federal gun control adviser Professor William Stenning declared that, "They just couldn't believe their eyes. They've seen lots of terrible things, but they've never seen anything like this."
But the point being missed is that the money blown in the gun registry goes beyond incompetence. You simply can't get from estimates of $2 million to expenditures of over $1 billion solely through mismanagement. This fact has barely rated a mention because I suspect that too many of us simply don't appreciate the significance of the numbers.
For example, software engineer Tony Olekshy has a wonderful illustration detailing the problem. Originally, the database was projected to cost $1 million, but even allowing for an underestimation in the magnitude of 1,000 per cent (or $10 million), the results are unfathomable.
Imagine if a private business had a $10-million contract and presented a bill for $30 million instead. Do you think the customer would be angry? What if that bill was three times higher again, at $90 million?
What if it grew by another factor of three, to $270 million, and then did it again? According to the CBC and other news organizations, the gun registry database cost $750 million. It cost 3-times-3-times-3-times-3-times the original estimate, which we allowed to be 1,000 per cent above the government's original forecast.
To put that number into perspective, imagine you and your spouse planned on having two children, but instead ending up with 162. In the same way you can't legitimately come up with 162 children, the gun registry database can't legitimately cost $750 million. I emphasize the word "legitimately."
Given the project has taken eight years, that works out to $250,000 per day, every day, of each of those eight years. I have found nobody familiar with that kind of project in the private sector who has the faintest idea as to how that can happen. It works out to $94 million per year for eight years, simply to run a database. In other words, every four days for eight years they spent the equivalent of the total original estimate of $1 million.
As Olekshy points out, it simply can't take the equivalent of 7,500-man years to build a gun-registry database for three million owners. The point is that bad management alone can't produce overruns like we've paid for.
Anywhere else there would be lawsuits, but we haven't even been treated to Paul Martin reminding us he's as mad as we are about this. No threat to "get to the bottom of this." No public inquiry. Yet the problem in financial terms is more significant.
Corporations get sued for cost overruns on the order of tens of per cent. Even starting with our generous estimation of $10 million, the database it is now 7,500 per cent over budget.
Hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars have disappeared and anyone familiar with numbers will understand that gross mismanagement alone cannot explain what has happened.