Strings attached

There was already no lack of reasons to be highly skeptical about the Cons' travelling patronage show. But CUPE points out that part of the small print for all Con infrastructure funding figures to cause serious problems for communities who don't share the Cons' privatization agenda:

Stephen Harper's Conservative Government is putting on a road show this summer, with a series of meetings and negotiations about its "Building Canada" plan, announced in the spring budget. This $33 billion fund doesn't actually include any additional money, but is just a repackaging of currently planned infrastructure funding with a new caveat: municipalities and other proponents will now have to fully consider public-private partnerships (P3s) as a condition for receiving funding.

"The need to demonstrate that they have "fully considered" the P3 option, even when public delivery is known to be more cost efficient and accountable, is extremely unreasonable," stated CUPE National President Paul Moist. "Simply preparing a P3 proposal can be very expensive for most municipalities, and prohibitively expensive for smaller municipalities."

"Under no circumstances should the federal government impose P3s, or an obligation to consider P3s, on municipal or other governments as a condition of receiving infrastructure or other funding," he continued. "Local governments are accountable to their taxpayers for the services they provide and understand their community needs and resources. They shouldn't be forced to risk public funds to comply with the ideological bias and private interests of upper levels of government."

Now, it's bad enough to see yet another example of the Cons' willingness to spend more to get less if it means transferring money and resources away from governments. But the Cons' move looks all the more absurd if one contrasts the P3 requirement for infrastructure spending with the Cons' complete lack of interest in accountability when it comes to provinces spending federal money in areas such as child care and health care.

It speaks volumes about the Cons that the sole condition they seem willing to attach to public money is that it has to be used in substantial part to remove public infrastructure from public hands. And the more attention the Cons receive for such a warped sense of priorities, the more likely Canadians are to decide that they can't be trusted with the public purse.