You may recall the Canada 150 project known as the Parliament Hill ice rink. It was a boondoggle that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation awarded with a federal “Teddy Government Waste Award.”

We finally received access to information documents from the federal government to give us an understanding of how this sesquicentennial-inspired monster came to fruition.

Who knows why the idea of building a temporary ice hockey rink on Parliament Hill was deemed of paramount importance for the Canada 150 celebrations, or why a simple patch of ice surrounded by a few plywood boards wouldn’t do the trick.

The project was spearheaded by Ottawa bureaucrats using taxpayer money, so of course it would have to be the Rolls-Royce of ice rinks.

And, since this was a federal government project, it missed its original deadline and the off-the-lot price was $82.M, translating into a staggering $100K per-day cost. 

As this Franken-Rink evolved from harebrained idea to entrenched reality, the correspondence between bureaucrats responsible for this fiasco makes for unintentionally funny reading.

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