Bob Kinnear points out (link is external) the utter lack of a rational explanation for Ontario's giveaway of public assets and institutions - that is, other than to generate a source of unearned money for the financial sector......
It's hard for a lot of Ontarians to understand the latest wave of public-sector sell-offs taking place in this province, especially the ones that nobody ever voted for. But it's even harder for those of us in the transportation business, which has suffered from this wrong-headed strategy more than any other public enterprise.
Former TTC chief general manager Rick Ducharme never visited city hall without a briefcase filled with clippings of transit privatization horror stories from around the world. And that was before the collapse of the biggest public-private partnership (P3) of them all — the privatization of the London Underground, which was supposed to prove the concept for the whole world to see.
Instead, British taxpayers spent more than one billion pounds mopping up the debt left by the bankruptcy of the P3's private-sector partner — after having spent half that already to put the complex deal together in the first place.
Or consider Melbourne, Australia, a city very like Toronto, where privatization has left such a crippled transit system that most citizens have no access to buses after 8 p.m. — and none at all on Sundays. Is that what we want for our city?
Even the supposed successes, once you read the fine print, turn out to be losers. Transit in York Region north of Toronto is the only fully privatized system in Canada and charges the highest fares — $4 for a single Zone 1 bus ride, a dollar more for Zone 2. It is also the most heavily subsidized in Ontario, with taxpayers kicking in an additional $5 every time a paying passenger boards that bus.
By contrast, the publicly owned, publicly managed TTC receives a subsidy of 29 cents for every passenger — one of the best cost-recovery performances of any transit agency in North America. And, I might add, the TTC pays its unionized staff considerably better than the mainly foreign owners of York Region's high-cost transit system pay their workers.
I only wish more people had paid attention to the auditor general's recent report on this province's adventures in what it calls “Alternative Financing and Procurement” (AFP). The AG analyzed 74 P3 projects managed by Infrastructure Ontario and concluded that taxpayers have paid $8-billion more than they would have if the public sector had financed and managed the projects — enough in itself to build a subway three times longer than the beleaguered Spadina extension.
Against that, she balanced the savings estimated to result from private-sector management of these facilities. And that is where the real scandal emerged.
more
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/com...rios-bewildering-public-sector-sell-offs.html
It's hard for a lot of Ontarians to understand the latest wave of public-sector sell-offs taking place in this province, especially the ones that nobody ever voted for. But it's even harder for those of us in the transportation business, which has suffered from this wrong-headed strategy more than any other public enterprise.
Former TTC chief general manager Rick Ducharme never visited city hall without a briefcase filled with clippings of transit privatization horror stories from around the world. And that was before the collapse of the biggest public-private partnership (P3) of them all — the privatization of the London Underground, which was supposed to prove the concept for the whole world to see.
Instead, British taxpayers spent more than one billion pounds mopping up the debt left by the bankruptcy of the P3's private-sector partner — after having spent half that already to put the complex deal together in the first place.
Or consider Melbourne, Australia, a city very like Toronto, where privatization has left such a crippled transit system that most citizens have no access to buses after 8 p.m. — and none at all on Sundays. Is that what we want for our city?
Even the supposed successes, once you read the fine print, turn out to be losers. Transit in York Region north of Toronto is the only fully privatized system in Canada and charges the highest fares — $4 for a single Zone 1 bus ride, a dollar more for Zone 2. It is also the most heavily subsidized in Ontario, with taxpayers kicking in an additional $5 every time a paying passenger boards that bus.
By contrast, the publicly owned, publicly managed TTC receives a subsidy of 29 cents for every passenger — one of the best cost-recovery performances of any transit agency in North America. And, I might add, the TTC pays its unionized staff considerably better than the mainly foreign owners of York Region's high-cost transit system pay their workers.
I only wish more people had paid attention to the auditor general's recent report on this province's adventures in what it calls “Alternative Financing and Procurement” (AFP). The AG analyzed 74 P3 projects managed by Infrastructure Ontario and concluded that taxpayers have paid $8-billion more than they would have if the public sector had financed and managed the projects — enough in itself to build a subway three times longer than the beleaguered Spadina extension.
Against that, she balanced the savings estimated to result from private-sector management of these facilities. And that is where the real scandal emerged.
more
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/com...rios-bewildering-public-sector-sell-offs.html
