Alex Hemingway highlights (link is external) the similarities between Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump in pushing infrastructure plans designed primarily to turn the promise of public services into long-term corporate profit centres:
But as described recently (link is external) in the Canadian context, these “partnerships” have proven enormously costly:
“P3s are simply less efficient – on average costing dramatically more than the public sector alternative. And it’s not hard to understand why…
Traditional publicly-funded and operated projects… don’t require paying out profits to private investors and, importantly, have lower financing costs, since government can secure much better interest rates than a private corporation.
This has all been well understood since the 1990s and documented (link is external) over the years in a whole (link is external) range (link is external) of research (link is external) on P3s (link is external).”In fact, the Ontario Auditor General recently reported (link is external) that the province had lost a jaw-dropping $8 billion over a decade by building projects as P3s rather than as traditional public infrastructure projects.
To top it off, privatization tends to increase inequality (link is external) by driving down wages and ramping up user fees (link is external), while eroding the capacity of our public sector. That’s why many cities across Canada and around the world have begun bringing services back in-house (link is external) after failed experiments with P3s.
Now, ignoring this body of evidence, our own federal government is working from the same playbook as Donald Trump, planning a major privatization of Canadian infrastructure.
...
This should all be deeply worrying to Canadians. The push for privatization illustrates how neoliberalism is alive and well – in Trump’s America and Trudeau’s Canada. Yet the evidence is clear: selling out our public infrastructure is both unnecessary and incredibly costly.
But as described recently (link is external) in the Canadian context, these “partnerships” have proven enormously costly:
“P3s are simply less efficient – on average costing dramatically more than the public sector alternative. And it’s not hard to understand why…
Traditional publicly-funded and operated projects… don’t require paying out profits to private investors and, importantly, have lower financing costs, since government can secure much better interest rates than a private corporation.
This has all been well understood since the 1990s and documented (link is external) over the years in a whole (link is external) range (link is external) of research (link is external) on P3s (link is external).”In fact, the Ontario Auditor General recently reported (link is external) that the province had lost a jaw-dropping $8 billion over a decade by building projects as P3s rather than as traditional public infrastructure projects.
To top it off, privatization tends to increase inequality (link is external) by driving down wages and ramping up user fees (link is external), while eroding the capacity of our public sector. That’s why many cities across Canada and around the world have begun bringing services back in-house (link is external) after failed experiments with P3s.
Now, ignoring this body of evidence, our own federal government is working from the same playbook as Donald Trump, planning a major privatization of Canadian infrastructure.
...
This should all be deeply worrying to Canadians. The push for privatization illustrates how neoliberalism is alive and well – in Trump’s America and Trudeau’s Canada. Yet the evidence is clear: selling out our public infrastructure is both unnecessary and incredibly costly.
