As the old saying goes, if you sit down at a poker table and can’t spot the sucker, you’re it. And there shouldn’t be much doubt that when the City of Regina sits down with an interconnected group of consultants and privatization advocates to decide who stands to be handed
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Accidental Deliberations: #wwtp Referendum Roundup
A few links and notes as Regina’s wastewater referendum approaches tomorrow. – Jason Hammond explains that his Yes vote will be based largely on concerns about the City’s dishonesty and sense of entitlement in trying to push through a P3 model. And Paul Dechene provides the full list of City
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Regina’s P3 Columnists
As the referendum on whether to privatize Regina’s wastewater plant nears, the Regina Leader-Post is printing a column a day advocating the P3: John Gormley on Friday, Bruce Johnstone on Saturday, and Murray Mandryk today. Johnstone and Mandryk repeat three of the City’s key claims. Gormley only gets to one
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Paul Krugman writes about the right-wing belief that “freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat”: (Y)ou might think that ensuring adequate nutrition for children, which is a large part of what SNAP does, actually makes it less, not more likely that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Paul Dechene interviews Maude Barlow about the downside of privatizing public infrastructure: Somebody asked me to point blank explain the difference between private and public and I said, profit. That’s the difference. In a public system, it’s the same amount of money; you’re
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: On questions of trust
I’ll give Deputy City Manager Brent Sjoberg credit for at least partially answering one of my long-standing questions about a privatized water treatment plant: namely, who’s going to be left with the job of making sure a private operator lives up to its promises? Q8. What are the contractual terms
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: What’s the real risk and cost for Regina’s wastewater P3?
The City of Regina is engaged in a controversial debate about a proposed public private partnership (P3) for the city’s wastewater plant. Residents formed a Regina Water Watch group to keep the facility public. They collected enough names to take the issue to a municipal referendum on September 25th, despite
Continue readingOPSEU Diablogue: Short Takes: Hillier’s remarkable labour conversion, the battle of the inequality authors and more
It is somewhat astonishing to see PC Randy Hillier vote against a Tory private member’s bill that would free construction giant EllisDon from a 55-year-old obligation to hire only unionized labour. This is the same Randy Hillier who, as the … Continue reading →
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Toby Sanger asks who really bears the risk when governments agree to hand over billions to the private sector through P3 arrangements: While Canada may be one of the leaders in the market for P3s, we’re far from a leader when it
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Who really bears the risk for P3s?
Canada is now the second biggest market for public private partnerships (P3s) in the world, as a recent Conference Board report showed (on page 30, see my initial critique here). P3s are big business: Canadian governments closed deals on a reported $7 billion in P3 contracts in both 2010 and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Lana Payne discusses Unifor’s goals in the wake of its founding convention: The hope is that, collectively, working people can push back in new and profound ways against what has been a decades-long, anti-worker agenda perpetuated by both governments and corporations. But just
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Juxtaposition
The Fouge sez: have no fear about corporate abuses or contract manipulation in a privatized wastewater system because…public procurement process! Hamilton Wastewater System – A sewage operation and maintenance contract in Hamilton was cancelled. In Hamilton, the contractor was hired without a public procurement process. The City of Regina will
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on the dangers of accepting advice from self-interested advisers – and the obvious conflict of interest of the consultants hired to push a wastewater P3 on Regina’s citizens. For further reading…– The Museum of Hoaxes offers some background on the now-notorious movie reviews of Dave Manning. – Matt Taibbi
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Simon Enoch nicely challenges the City of Regina’s blind faith in “risk transfer” by pointing out how that concept has typically been applied elsewhere: So what price should we put on such a risk transfer? This is where things can get dicey. How
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: P3 or No Federal Funding: A Third Option for Regina Wastewater?
The Queen City’s water debate has boiled over since I last blogged about it. City Council decided to build a new wastewater-treatment facility as a public-private partnership (P3), but a group of concerned citizens gathered 24,000 signatures to force a referendum on whether to “publicly finance, operate and maintain the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Polly Toynbee discusses how the UK’s attacks on social programs are based on gross ignorance about what social spending does (and who it helps): The Citizens Advice Bureau reports a rise of 78% in the last six months in people needing food banks
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Blissful Ignorance: another Conference Board report on P3s
The Conference Board of Canada has produced another report on P3s, funded by the federal and provincial P3 agencies and the Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships (CCPPP). Unfortunately and sadly predictably, it’s another exercise in largely blissful ignorance promoting P3s, while glossing over or ignoring their major problems. For
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Mark Leiren-Young shares Corky Evans’ perceptive take on how the B.C. NDP has lost its way – and the message is one which we should apply elsewhere as well: I remember when one of the Leaders I worked for asked some guys
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how the City of Regina’s wastewater treatment referendum campaign is based on either a major omission as to the costs of privatizing services, or a dangerous assumption that the City doesn’t need to have any idea how its own treatment plant works. For further reading…– I take my
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your holiday reading. – Paul Buchhelt discusses eight areas where privatization has proven to be a disaster in the U.S. – with one holding particular interest for Regina residents: A 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge
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