Meili still looking for answers in SHNB build concerns

The province announced last May the entire roof of the SHNB would need to be replaced due to water leaks from faulty roofing panels. The $407-million facility held its official grand opening March 14, 2019.

“There were a number of communications pointing out the province was well aware there were going to be problems with the roof, and that they failed to intervene in any way,” Meili said. “So we are seeing this roof have to be replaced when the government should have stepped in, and said: Don’t proceed with something that isn’t going to work.”

Meili said it raises questions about how committed the province was to “getting this done right, versus just getting it out the door,” to launch the opening of the facility.

He said the issue seemed to be more about politics than about “the people that are being served.”

“It also raises lots of questions about the P3 [public-private partnership] contract,” Meili said of the project.

He asked why the province used an out-of-country company to build the facility in the first place. Carillion PLC, which went into liquidation in 2018, was one of several companies that were part of the consortium Access Prairies Partnership [APP], involved in the facility construction.

Meili believes the province appears to have been more concerned about meeting a project completion deadline and the project’s cost than the quality of the work.

He also asked why when there were issues raised from the government about the project construction did the work continue to go ahead.

The NDP obtained documents through a Freedom of Information request that show concerns about the roof at the new SHNB started as early as the design phase. As a result the Saskatchewan NDP asked the province to ensure the facility audit ordered last October also addresses this issue and what it sees as “serious failures in the decision-making process between the SHA [Saskatchewan Health Authority] and SaskBuilds.”

The NDP said in a release a SaskBuilds official stated in an email from March 13, 2019, that “with the spring thaw, some major issues with the roof at SHNB have come to the forefront. The roof was a serious bone of contention during the design and construction, and unfortunately the Authority’s concerns were well-founded.”

The SHNB experienced a number of leaks in the facility related to the roof construction.

The province’s SaskBuilds Minister Gordon Wyant responded to the NDP’s concerns in a statement, saying: “While product integrity is not the responsibility of government under the P3 model, government did raise this question with APP at the time of the building envelope failure in Fall 2017. APP indicated there was no issue with the roof, which was constructed at the same time but used different material. It was not until a spring melt in 2019 that the roof failure was identified through months of extensive testing that APP undertook.”

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsnow

by Angela Brown

Meili still looking for answers in SHNB build concerns

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