Few topics attract as much consternation among North Vancouver District residents as the unfortunate story of Metro Vancouver’s handling of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant. We all know the basic facts. Metro Vancouver initially announced the plant in 2011, with cost estimates delivered in 2013.
The $700 million facility was to be funded by $405 million in grants from the Provincial and Federal governments, with Metro Vancouver being responsible for $295 million. The contract was awarded (for the budgeted $700 million) in 2017. The plant was to be completed by 2020.
However, after a series of terrible decisions by Metro Vancouver, the plant is now scheduled to be completed in 2030 (or later), and the total contract price is now estimated at $3.86 billion (or higher, if the cost of reclamation of the site of the existing sewage treatment plant is included).
As if to rub salt in the wounds of North Shore ratepayers, a similar plant in Victoria was also contracted for $775 million in 2017, with a scheduled 2020 completion date, and the Capital Regional District successfully brought it in on time and on budget. Something clearly went very wrong at Metro Vancouver.
The estimated impact of Metro Vancouver’s cost overruns (which exceed $3 billion) on individual North Shore households varies, but an extra payment of $725 per ratepayer per year over 30 years is a reasonable estimate, which means that the Metro Vancouver sewage treatment plant boondoggle will cost each North Shore household tens of thousands of dollars—wasted money which will come from the already stretched budgets of North Shore families.
So how did this happen? Where did this $3 billion go? Remarkably, to date, Metro Vancouver has given no proper explanation, and we still don’t know who made the relevant decisions that led us into this fiscal catastrophe, what information they relied on, or why North Shore ratepayers face such terrible consequences. The whole affair continues to lurk under a cloak of non-transparency, with calls for a full external public inquiry being rejected by both Metro Vancouver and the Province.
When the rest of us make mistakes, we are accountable. No so Metro Vancouver, which has never given us a straight answer on how $700 million became $3.86 billion, and why North Shore ratepayers need to suffer the consequences.
A review of available online media shows that when the $700 million contract was awarded in 2017, Darrell Mussatto chaired the Metro Vancouver utilities committee. He was moonlighting in that role, while also serving as Mayor of the City of Vancouver. In news releases accompanying the awarding of the contract, his comments are restricted to the architectural form of the facility, saying: “Its facade accentuates the North Shore coastline and waters of Burrard Inlet.”
His statements in the media at the time do not address the financial implications of this decision nor any financial risks to North Shore taxpayers. No doubt, Mussatto’s duties as Mayor of the City of North Vancouver kept him busy. How much time either Mussatto or any committee member dedicated to assessing the contract’s financial details and risks before it was issued in 2017 has not, to my knowledge, been publicly discussed. In my view, this is an important question. Nor have we received a clear statement about the errors among Metro Vancouver staff that contributed to this $3.0 billion overrun.
More recently, in late July 2026, the Metro Vancouver Board was required to allocate $235 million received in a settlement from the sewage treatment plant contractor, Acciona. The Board decided to allocate these funds among all sewage sub-regions of Metro Vancouver, despite a call from North Shore directors to allocate them to North Shore ratepayers. North Shore’s voice at Metro Vancouver is apparently not being heard.
So what is to be done? I believe that we must abandon the current governance model at Metro Vancouver. The current model —having Councillors and Mayors moonlight as committee members at Metro Vancouver —is clearly not working, certainly not for the North Shore. North Shore residents face a classic case of “taxation without representation.” Residents are required to spend billions on utility levies imposed by committee members who are not directly elected to their positions, but rather appointed through some opaque back-room process.
A better system would be to have direct representation at Metro Vancouver by persons elected from the sub-regions whose job requires meaningful oversight of Metro Vancouver’s spending, not the kind of side-of-the-desk management that apparently contributed to the current $3 billion overrun. Yes, we need a full accounting of what went wrong.
Yes, we need Metro Vancouver to name names, so we can understand how $700 million became $3.86 billion and counting. But beyond all of that, we need a new governance model for directly elected representation at Metro Vancouver. North Shore residents deserve nothing less.
For my part, I have written to the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs demanding this governance reform. We await her answer.
Jim Hanson is a councillor with the District of North Vancouver.
It is atrocious and the people who made these terrible decisions need to be made accountable. There will is not excuses for poor mismanagement.