Several years ago, a medical team at McMaster University produced a studythat seemed to definitively prove privatization is bad for health care.After an extensive study of U.S. hospitals, the McMaster team concluded thatprivate, for-profit hospitals have significantly higher death rates.

One might think that would have encouraged policy-makers here to pause intheir rush toward privatization.

But no. Nothing seems able to derail the privatization train.

Its advocates, who are concentrated in the corporate sector, argue thatcorporations can deliver government services cheaper and better thangovernment.

There’s never been any evidence to back this up. In fact, there’s a lot ofevidence to contradict it, such as that McMaster study.

But lack of evidence has never been an obstacle. Corporate interests haveused the media (which they mostly own) and right-wing think-tanks (whichthey generously fund) to spread their anti-government ideology.

They’ve also bankrolled political parties and succeeded in gettinggovernments — including Dalton McGuinty’s — to embrace privatization.

McGuinty actually campaigned against the “public-private partnerships” orP3s, introduced by his Conservative predecessors, Mike Harris and ErnieEves. But, apparently succumbing to corporate pressure, McGuinty is nowlaunching a far-reaching privatization plan that goes beyond where Harris orEves dared to go.

In last week’s budget, McGuinty proposed using P3-type deals for the massive$30 billion rebuilding of Ontario’s infrastructure.

Among other things, this would mean handing over much of the management ofhospitals, schools and water systems to private companies. The governmentwould own these facilities, but private companies would run theirnon-professional operations and be assured a guaranteed revenue stream.

Natalie Mehra of the Ontario Health Coalition argues that this amounts tonothing less than a “private revolution.”

Ironically, it’s also a bureaucratic revolution, since the deals areenormously detailed legal arrangements. When government lawyers forgot tospecify that lights be installed in operating rooms in a P3 hospital inEdinburgh, the hospital was built without the lights, Mehra says.

She adds that the paperwork for the P3 hospital being built in Bramptonstands about six feet high.

The ostensible reason for our governments to get into these complicatedarrangements is that we need the private sector’s money.

But we don’t. The private sector must borrow the money — just as governmentwould borrow the money. In fact, government can borrow the money atsignificantly lower interest rates, reducing the overall cost of a long-termdeal by as much as 20 per cent.

So logic would demand government borrow the money itself. But the businesscommunity has generated such hysteria over government debt that politiciansprefer the private sector do the borrowing, even though the public stillpays for it and ultimately pays more.

With corporate profit margins also added in, P3s end up costing a lot more.In Britain, the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants has beensharply critical of the high costs of P3s.

None of this deters the McGuinty government, which has apparently taken overthe vanguard of Mike Harris’ private revolution.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...