'No Admittance Except on Business'
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- Published on Thursday, 18 February 2016 23:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1223 .... February 19, 2016
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‘No Admittance Except on Business’:
How P3s are Produced and the Secret of Their Profit Making
Heather Whiteside
"Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags ... we [enter] into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making."
— Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 6.
On February 21, 2016 a rare but much-needed Anti-Privatization Forum is being held in Toronto. The event not only continues a decades-long struggle by unions, activists, and concerned citizens to protect public services; it identifies areas of particular relevance in Ontario's privatization saga today -- namely in relation... to healthcare, hydro, transit, and housing.
If Canada's late 1980s and early 1990s privatization schemes largely favoured creating new sources of private profit making through the divestiture of state assets, by the late 1990s new avenues of privatization were being increasingly located within the state in the form of public-private partnerships (P3s).
While public-private collaboration may be nothing new in Canada, P3s for public infrastructure and services establish binding, multi-decade long contracts that bundle the private for-profit design, construction, finance, and management of public works that remain state responsibilities. With these partnerships, the state remains on the hook and the privatization dimension often flies under the radar. Seldom is any effort by P3 promoters put into making the public-at-large aware of what exactly P3s are, how they are produced, and how they work as a hidden abode of profit making within public sector operations. This despite many an Ontario P3 being a household name: Highway 407, the Brampton Civic Hospital, the Thunder Bay and Waterloo courthouses, and several up-and-coming LRT projects in Toronto, like Finch West and Eglinton Crosstown, just to name a few.