After the drubbing he took following last year’s provincial budget, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty probably thinks he got away with something last week. But, by officially adopting the Harrisites’ view on privatization — that the only thing wrong with public services is that no one is making a profit off them — McGuinty is reinforcing his status as a world record holder in the underappreciated sport of promise-breaking.

Back when he was leader of the opposition, McGuinty couldn’t have been more clear about where he stood on so-called public-private partnerships (P3s), particularly in health care. “I stand against the Americanization of our hospitals,” he declared at a campaign stop in Kitchener. The Liberal platform called for the passage of a “Commitment to Medicare Act that will make universal, public medicare the law in Ontario. The Harris-Eves government is opening the way to private MRI and CT clinics and private hospitals. As the Romanow Commission proved, privatization is a step backward. We will end the Harris-Eves agenda of creeping privatization.”

When the Tories were in power, McGuinty claimed to oppose their attempts to tie desperately needed new hospitals to privatization. “We believe in public ownership and public financing. I will take these hospitals and bring them inside the public sector,” McGuinty promised in May 2003.

It took the Liberals only a few months in office to discover that they too loved the idea of turning public assets over to the private sector. In January 2004, Health Minister George Smitherman announced that the Tories’ P3 hospitals would go ahead with only minor changes in the financing structure. Instead of the government leasing the hospitals from the corporations that built them, the corporations would nominally turn over the title to the province and receive “mortgage payments” instead of lease payments. At the carnival, this technique is known as “a shell game.”

The Ontario Council of Hospital Unions alleged last year that the Liberals were planning not only to go ahead with the Tories’ private hospitals, but to engage in wholesale privatization of the health care system. “It’s pretty disheartening that it was the party that campaigned against them that’s ushering in not just two, but possibly another six, and (leading) the entire system to privatization,” said council president Michael Hurley. “Over the course of the next 10 years, pretty much every hospital in Ontario will be rebuilt, and rebuilt as a P3, which means the entire hospital system will move over to private ownership,” Hurley warned. At the time, Smitherman called these accusations “quite preposterous.”

Just over a year later, the preposterous has become policy. Infrastructure Minister David Caplan announced last week that “We intend to vigorously pursue opportunities to partner with the private sector in the delivery and financing of public infrastructure.” He added that “It’s not a code phrase for privatizing public services. It is a strategy for building more public infrastructure, and importantly, building it faster.” (I’d have to agree. It’s not a code word for privatization at all, because they didn’t bother to put it in code). In his best “make me an offer” suit, Caplan promised that the government would “at least entertain” any offer from the private sector to take over the building and operation of infrastructure from the government.

The Liberal budget put some meat on the bones of Caplan’s announcement, setting out a five-year plan to hand over the rights to build more than $100 billion worth of infrastructure, including roads and bridges, public transit systems, and new hospitals, schools and courthouses. The thing is, having the private sector control public infrastructure isn’t cheaper; it just helps the government look as if it’s not running a deficit by taking the money off its books.

In fact, countless studies in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have proven that P3s are more expensive, because of the need to build in a profit for the private-sector partner and also because of increased borrowing costs (for example, in Nova Scotia, the NDP revealed that Scotia Learning was borrowing at a rate of 6.22 per cent when it built new schools, while the provincial government could have borrowed at 5.6 per cent — leading to $3.5 million in additional interest costs).

“Government can borrow that money and will pay a much lower interest rate than a private company will pay, and you don’t have a 15 per cent profit taken off the bill as well,” charged NDP leader Howard Hampton. “The Liberal strategy is no different than that of their Conservative predecessors. This is exactly the agenda that (former Premier) Mike Harris was working on.” Small wonder that former Tory finance minister Jim Flaherty was gloating about the Liberals’ reversal in the legislature last week.

Not only have the Liberals adopted the Conservatives’ policy in favour of privatization, but they’ve also adopted their predecessor’s habit of fear-mongering as a means of challenging any opposition to P3s. In response to a question from Hampton last week, McGuinty alleged that “The leader of the NDP, if he had his way, as I understand it, would shut those hospitals down and deprive those communities of that important health care service. That may be his approach, but that is not our approach.” Caplan echoed this hyperbole by claiming that, “the alternative is we continue to decline.”

No, the alternative is acting in the public interest. The alternative is keeping your promises.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...