The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says Nova Scotia government highway crews are doing half the work for double the cost.

The province got into the paving business in 2011 to save money and now the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling for an independent review of its operation after obtaining documents through access-to-information.

According to business plans, the provincial government predicted it would cost just over $3,000 for each kilometer of roadwork, but the actual cost was more than $7,300.

“At the same time, they’re running double the costs for the workers,” says Kevin Lacey, the Atlantic spokesman for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “They’re doing half as much work as they said they were going to do.”

The government had also predicted it would chip, seal and pave 456 kilometres in 2012, but it only completed about half of that at 227 kilometres.

“The reason why this is so important is that money wasted on this program means it cannot go into fixing the roads that taxpayers expect the government to do,” says Lacey.

Nova Scotia has 14,000 kilometres of paved roads to maintain and has one of the highest percentages of paved roads in the country; only Prince Edward Island and British Columbia have more.

Grant Feltmate, executive director of the Nova Scotia Road Builders Association, says he isn’t surprised by the numbers. He says he knew when the government got into the paving business in 2011 that it wouldn’t work.

“Road building is a heck of a lot harder than it looks,” says Feltmate. “They were unachievable, unrealistic business plans. The whole thing was based on something that was not going to happen.”

Nova Scotia’s minister of transportation and infrastructure renewal says the report only looks at specific elements of the cost. He maintains Nova Scotians are still getting more value for their money, but Lacey says the government is spending more and doing less.

“They used a sledgehammer to kill an ant and this program is too expensive for the problem that they were trying to solve.”

At the time, the government said it wanted to address unfair pricing and a lack of competition for project tenders in some rural areas of the province.

Lacey says a review of the program is needed because it is inefficient but the government says there won’t be a review until it has been paving roads for four or five years.

With files from CTV Atlantic's Kayla Hounsell