Failure never smelled so sweet

Politics/IT crossover moment! In his Globe & Mail column today, Gary Mason has this to say about the negotiations underway to bring LNG terminals to the BC coast:

Quick primer for the IT audience: in the last election the government promised 100s of thousands of jobs and 100s of billions of revenue (and amazingly, I’m not exaggerating those figures) should BC successfully seed an LNG “industry” on our coast. It was basically all they talked about in the campaign. Unsurprisingly, having placed all their political eggs in the LNG basket, the government is now at the mercy of the companies that are supposed to bring us this windfall, as Mason notes below.

There is an enormous amount at stake for the Premier and her government. From the outside, it appears B.C. needs Petronas and the others more than they need B.C. Ms. Clark comes out the loser if those companies walk away and her LNG dream evaporates. She can also lose if her government signs desperate deals [emphasis mine] that are deemed to be so slanted in favour of the project promoter that the province becomes a global laughingstock.

Actually no, as anyone on a failed IT project knows, after a desperate deal is signed, both the LNG proponent (vendor) and government (manager) will get together and sing the praises of the finished deal.

“It’s a world class deal, and it was a tough negotiation, but we did it”, the government will say.

“They drove a hard bargain, but we think we can make it work”, the proponent will say.

The media at best will run a he said/she said with the government’s claims against the opposition’s analysis, and we’ll all move on. The government won’t be the loser in the case of a bad, desperate deal, the people of BC will.

Just as, when a vendor and a dependent manager deliver a shitty IT project and declare it the best thing since sliced chips, it’s the users who suffer in the end.