Eglinton Crosstown LRT opens nearly six years late, $6 billion over budget. Now Carney wants to centrally plan the country

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Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit line’s inaugural run left the station earlier this week, missing its departure time by approximately five minutes, 16 hours, 250 days and five years.  As a classic centrally planned state project, the line also hit the track $6 billion over budget.

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It’s not the first nor will it be the last major project to face the kind of problems that are inevitable under government-controlled economic development. What happens in local transit under state supervision can all too easily engulf the major centrally planned economic projects now proposed under Ottawa’s Building Canada Act and the government’s Major Projects Office.

It is an all-too-familiar economic observation among free-market theorists that central economic planning orchestrated by governments is ultimately doomed to fail for one good reason. No matter how many bureaucrats, technicians, consultants, private corporations and political brainiacs are at work devising economic structures and strategies under government authority, there is no way for state planners and politicians to allocate resources properly and efficiently. Nobel economist Friedrich Hayek famously called it “the knowledge problem.”

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