(Niagara At Large is posting the following January 23 media release from Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservative Party. The party believes Ontario residents may receive lower-cost, higher-quality services if wants to see competitive bidding for public service work.)
“This white paper says loud and clear that it shouldn’t matter if providers are from the state, private or voluntary sector as long as they offer a great service. The old, narrow, closed state monopoly is dead.”
– David Cameron on the Open Public Services White Paper, The Guardian, July 11, 2011
ONLY ONTARIO PCs WILL CREATE COMPETITION IN PUBLIC SERVICES
QUEEN’S PARK– Public sector unions would compete with private sector unions, not-for-profits and businesses to provide and deliver government services under an Ontario PC government, Leader Tim Hudak said today.
Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak in provincial legislature. Photo courtesy of PC leader's office.
“If we’re going to pull Ontario out of Dalton McGuinty’s jobs and spending crisis we need to think in innovative new ways,” Hudak said. “Creating competition in government service delivery can help us break away from hidebound, dated approaches to serving the public. It will also make government more efficient, freeing up savings for the services we all value – such as health care and education.”
Competition will ensure effective use of taxpayer dollars, improve customer service and promote innovation in service delivery, Hudak added, noting the role of government would be to supervise the competitive process and set and enforce standards.
“Our plan would encourage public employees to submit bids and compete – to bring private sector competitive pressures and incentives to the public sector,” Hudak said.
“If government workers can do a better job delivering a given service, fine. But there’s only one way to find out – by making them compete.”
Key benefits of Hudak’s competition plan include:
Cost savings: Competition encourages would-be service providers to keep costs to a minimum or lose the contract to a more efficient competitor.
Quality improvements: A competitive process encourages bidders to offer the best possible service quality to win out over their rivals.
Improved risk management: Governments are better able to control costs by building cost-containment provisions into contracts.
Innovation: The need for lower-cost, higher-quality services under competition encourages providers to create new, cutting-edge solutions to help win and retain government contracts.
“Under this form of managed competition, it doesn’t matter whether public or private sector employees earn the contract,” Hudak said. “The simple introduction of competition means that taxpayers win either way.
“With examples like these in hand, I say again to Premier McGuinty: You’re out of ideas for creating jobs, balancing the books and turning our economy around – so please take mine.”
ONTARIO SAVES WITH COMPETITIVE PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY
- · Competition in the delivery of public services that involves both the private and public sectors can produce savings of up to 25 or 30 per cent, according to two separate studies by Deloitte and the San Diego Institute for Policy Research and Reason.
- · The City of Chicago has saved $1 million in recycling costs within the first three months of its new managed competition program (CBS Chicago, January 2, 2012).
- · Florida saved more than $500 million and avoided an estimated $1 billion in future costs by opening government contracts up to the private sector between 1999 and 2007 (New Jersey Privatization Task Force report, 2010).
- · Philadelphia saved $275 million by encouraging the private sector to bid on contracts for 49 city services in the 1990s (Task Force, 2010).
- · In 2005, Virginia’s Department of General Services held a competitive bidding process for vehicle fleet maintenance. The process reduced preventative maintenance costs by 16 per cent and brake service costs by 65 per cent – from $228 to $81 (Task Force, 2010).
- · The City of Indianapolis produced $400 million in savings in the 1990s after adopting managed competition for over 80 city services, such as trash collection, pothole repair and water and wastewater services (Task Force, 2010).
- · In an effort to reduce growing taxpayer costs, the UK Government endorsed Managed competition for public service delivery in its 2011 Open Public ServicesWhite Paper.
(Niagara At Large invites you to shared your views on this post in the comment boxes below. NAL only posts comments by people who are willing to share their names with their views)
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I can’t see this working with some services, as the pressure will be to reduce costs, which means fewer services or lower quality services. I can’t see the heads of the successful bidding companies cutting their own salaries (but probably significantly increasing them),but will likely offer front line workers less money and benefits.
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You’ve got it right Angela. Private services = profit. Quality comes second. The first goal of any private business is to obtain profit for its shareholders, eg US health care which rates 37th after Costa Rica and ahead of Slovenia according to WHO. Also, once a private (should we say pirate) enterprise is able to dominate its competitors, the public can be held virtual prisoner, workers can be easily controlled if they want a job and CEOs make big bucks. Does this sound like the US perhaps? Again, this is being proposed by Tim Hudak, who earns HIS income, a good one at that, from the PUBLIC sector. Does anyone else recognize this as hypocritical?
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They better get the private sector to manage this program !
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Privatization is a hallmark of globalization. It ultimately leads to less accountability to the public, as well as a reduced public sphere. It also leads to crises such as the Walkerton catastrophe and Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis catastrophes. Services are being privatized/outsourced in hospitals and the results are deteriorating health care. Private institutions are less accountable to the public (i.e Caterpillar), and invariably overly concerned with profit, to the detriment of the public. It’s a race to the bottom, and the ship called Canada is heading there fast. As an aside, Mr. Hudak certainly has a strong media presence in Grimsby; his rhetoric blankets the papers all too regularly. Too bad more of us don’t get such privileges in the main/lamestream media.
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Interesting idea. The key to this I think is Hudak’s statement: the role of government would be to supervise the competitive process and set and enforce standards. If this could be implemented successfully, it might work. Otherwise it will just be an effort to cut costs and good patient services.
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P3 hospitals and private inroads into “universal health care” are also examples of the “race to the bottom”.
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P3 hospitals are also more expensive to the public treasury, because they “game” the system to the public’s detriment.
Mr. Hudak is using American examples, and yet the American poverty rates are ridiculously high, and their healthcare system is one of the most inefficient systems around … and very expensive.
A race to the bottom, to the detriment of the 99.
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The mantra of “competition” is also a misnomer. Current systems breed monopolies (Walmart,pharmaceuticals), rather than fair “competition”.
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I understand the concern from those who base all societies ills on either globalization or anthropogenic global warming, but this is about out of control public sector unions who hold the rest of the 99% hostage to achieve their goals. Race to the bottom indeed- how about a race to reality.
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Corporations are hoarding huge amounts of cash. Increased corporate tax rates would free up money for healthcare.
Also of note is an article in today’s Star: “Eight separate empirical studies compare for profit to non-profit hospitals… All showed that for-profit hospitals cost the government treasury more — by about 18 %.
When the government uses fear-mongering to say that there isn’t money for anything other than third world health care (scarcity myth), they’re wrong.
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With all due respect Mr. Taliano, the public sector has just as much baggage as the private sector.
Accountability begins and ends with management. You point to the Walkerton catastrophe but fail to mention that the government approved well was placed downhill from a manure yard. Of interest was the fact that the privately operate water testing company warned Walkerton of the danger within 24 hours. The illness and deaths occurred because of a cover-up perpetrated by a town employee who withheld the information from the coroner. Our well water is tested in a government run lab in Hamilton with a wait time of 6 days as opposed the private lab’s warning within hours.
Mr. Taliano, do you really think that the Maple Leaf Listeriosis outbreak was caused solely by the fact that the employees worked for a private firm instead of a government run operation?
You cite our hospitals as evidence, that privatization is ‘a race to the bottom’. May I remind you that our hospitals are run by the government and that we have just witnessed 37 dead and hundreds sickened plus we’ve come through a spate of other serious infections? You will observe that our government run hospitals, NHS, HIS all the way up to and including our Provincial Government have a proven track record of being totally unaccountable to the public, which is a far cry from the conduct of Maple Leaf Foods!
It would appear to me that we are stuck between an under-supervised private enterprise (i.e. Caterpillar), and that of a bloated, unaccountable, lethargic and an overly expensive bureaucratic nightmare.
I don’t know if Mr. Hudak has the capacity to stand by his words that: ‘the role of government would be to SUPERVISE the competitive process and to SET AND ENFORCE STANDARDS’, but it certainly would be a giant leap forward or as Pat Scholfield stated; ‘If this could be implemented successfully, it might work’.
The fact remains that our race to the bottom is being caused by successive governments delivering incompetence, cover up, conspiracy and outright lies and all you can do is blame private enterprise and your fellow Canadians for being ENERGETIC entrepreneurs.
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Mr. Haskell, energetic entreprenuers are all well and good. There must be, however, a balance between public and private sectors. Currently, particularly in our southern neighbour, rampant Capitalism and privatization has eliminated all competition and resulted in mega rich CEOs and off-shore hoarding of much needed capital for investment. Governments in turn are dominated by the lobbyists of these wealthy conglomerates so, in essence, our “public” sector is actually a puppet of the private sector which is trying to destroy any advances made in the last decade for poor working stiffs. This means both the public and private sector are privately controlled and the voting public has been to lethargic to mobilize against the trend. The chickens are voting for Colonel Saunders. We should not be fearing or hating the politicians who are doing this to us. They are merely puppets. We must fear the hans inside the puppets. They are the ones running the show for their own selfish interests.
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Sorry, I should proof read:
I meant gains in the last “century”,”hands” inside the puppets and “too” lethargic. My bad.
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Elizabeth Warren from Harvard has stated that, in the US, the top earning 30 corporations in the US paid more to lobbyists than in taxes. This raises two questions…1- How is that to be allowed and 2- What do they expect to get from such enormous investments? Obviously the private sector is wildly out of control as well.
In response to Mr Levick, I hardly think the public sector unions are holding us hostage. The CEO’s at the top of the public sector are.
One must remember why we have unions. Years ago they were created because “Mr. Big” ran rampant over the workers with unsafe working conditions, long hours, child labour and no worker benefits. While some unions are out of control (which shall remain nameless) they served a purpose and we certainly cannot return to the so called Gilded Age where the barons of industry treated workers like dirt.
As Mark said, the corporate profits are being hoarded and unavailable money does no good to anyone but them. The average wages of CEOs have skyrocketed anywhere from 30 to 50 % in the last two decades while average labourers’ wages have stagnated or decreased. Does that not stike anyone else as unjustifiable.
Get the cash back into circulation through increased corporate taxes. Some say this will discourage job creation. Last year a GE plant in the northern US made billions in profit, paid no taxes and moved to China leaving thousands unemployed. How can zero taxes be reduced? The company still left for cheap labour to increase profits. How did that create jobs. Privatization of certain services in Canada would be disastrous.
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I like to keep these comments non-personal. So if I disagree, I respectfully disagree.
Currently the government is cutting back on food inspectors. I see that as a big mistake: “private industry” such as Maple Leaf can’t be trusted to adequately inspect their own product, especially with huge industrialized operations that lend themselves to the spread of infections etc.
Walkerton was essentially a problem with a private company’s negligence, from what I understand.
For-profit healthcare is a huge mistake. It is also fiscally irresponsible. I researched this and wrote an article on it for this site. Likewise P3 hospitals are fiscally irresponsible. On a moral plane, where everyone’s life is considered equal, privatization of healthcare is a disaster.
I am critical of large/transnational corporations, not local businessses. Huge corporations are not spending their cash hoards, which they have accrued through massive corporate tax breaks.If corporate tax rates were raised, it would generate billions of dollars (depending on how much the rates were raised.) According to Democracy Watch Canada “Canadian” corporations spend $25 billion a year using nearly 10,000 professional lobbyists to influence our governments. Huge corporations are more about profits than jobs or social welfare. Sending jobs to China is almost like having our products manufactured using slave labour.
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Getting back to the entrepreneurs and the huge monopolies. If huge media monopolies were better controlled, we would have smaller businesses running newspapers. Smaller entrepreneurs do a better job in running newspapers (i.e the earlier Standard in the Burgoyne era). As it stands with media conglomerates such as SUN media, we are being bombarded with a corporate slant to the detriment of our democracy. I see it as a huge problem.
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Preston, hospitals are NOT run by the government. They are run by private, not for profit corporations with their own board of directors. In the case of the NHS, they decided to cut costs by privatizing/outsourcing the cleaning staff and as a result, we kill almost 40 people with c difficile. A private company will not ensure that it hires highly skilled cleaning staff that can specifically work in hospitals (and pay them good wages, so there is not a lot of staff turnover). They might have saved some money, but they compromised the ability of the hospital to deliver good health care.
As for government supervision of private sector. Think ORNGE … the ridiculous executive salaries, the side businesses detracting from the organization’s public interest purpose and overall inefficiencies.
Some services that are straight forward and can be easily done with minimal risk to public safety and health, or to vulnerable persons, can be privatized, like garbage collection, payroll services, etc. But we are risking lots by allowing for-profit pirates to take over our health care and social services administration, where standards mean very little.
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Folks, it appears to me that while everyone is complaining about government run institutions and government controlled surrogate corporations they continue to make wild claims against private companies.
Our hospitals are run by government not-for-profit surrogates with a proven track record of not having accountability to the public. Our NHS answered to no one not even our local municipalities.
For those believing that our hospitals ‘are run by private, not for profit corporations with their own board of directors’ should be able to name the owner or point to those who are investor/shareholders.
It is true that the World Health Organization ranks health care in the United States as 37th out of 190 countries but Canadians should be concerned about the fact that the same study shows Canada as 30th and well behind Colombia, Malta, Morocco, Portugal, and Greece.
Instead of ranting about the perceived notion that all the ills in Canada are predicated on private enterprise, perhaps we should focus our attention on government’s inadequate management.
Whatever our problems they will not be solved by fighting partisan party politics or by comparing the costs of private for profit corporations with costly and bloated public institutions.
It is astonishing that comments by MPP Hudak could attract so much rhetoric aimed primarily at protecting their own turf and lifestyle.
The simple fact is that only through proper management can our problems be mitigated.
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Canada’s health care rating has plummeted in the past few years. That is primarily due to the gov’t outsourcing areas of care to private businesses, eg food prep, cleaning staff which has reduced the services to skeleton crews who cannot do the work effectively and are often poorly trained. As well, it is no secret that the government is purposely cutting back funs to PROVE the system is inefficient. This is being done at the request of lobbyists who are greasing appropriate palms. These lobbyists are private insurance cos., US based who are rubbing their hands with glee at the possibility of another 30+ mllion suckers to bleed dry. These same tactics were used back in the 50’s and 60’s…it has since been proven so…to . discourage the acceptance of universal gov’t sponsored universal health care in the prairies
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My previous post was interrupted…The tricks the US companies used back then failed, fortunately. That does not mean they won’t succeed this time. It has only been since this change has been brought about by monied interlopers that the system is going down the tubes. Read up in any accurate history book about the struggles faced to get universal health care in Canada. It’s all there should we care to investigate.
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Harper and to some extent McGuinty want to make public health care look overly expensive and inefficient, wait times too long, de-list this and de-list that, so that private health care companies and insurers can come in to fill the “gap”; that is, for young healthy people without pre-existing health conditions and/or for wealthier people that can afford escalating premiums and/or out of pocket care, while the rest of us would lose our homes.
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