Birth of a fiasco: How the Ontario Tories completely botched the sale of Highway 407
For Ontario taxpayers, Highway 407 is a wound that continues to throb. In her new book, The Sport and Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are stealing Canada’s Public Wealth, Linda McQuaig looks at the dogma of privatization. In this chapter, McQuaig — who recently argued that if Premier Doug Ford is cancelling contracts, then maybe he should rip up the 407 sale — examines how the sale of the toll road came about, and what’s happened since.
Privatization has become the economic dogma of our times — a doctrine that is rarely questioned, but has cost us dearly. To see the costs, we need look no farther than Highway 407. Its sale in 1999 was the biggest privatization in Canadian history and almost certainly the worst deal of the century.
Although controversial at the time, its critics couldn’t have imagined just how much it would end up costing Ontarians, and how much more it will continue to cost us until the deal expires in 2098 — just two years before the next millennium when anyone now reading these words will almost certainly be dead or at least too old to celebrate.
Certainly, it illustrates why we should be wary of governments leading us further down the privatization path.
The 407 sale was the brainchild of Mike Harris’s Conservative government, which swept to power in the 1995 Ontario election pledging a “Common Sense Revolution” that would cut taxes, balance the budget and reduce the size of government. The government set up a Privatization Secretariat, and filled it with recruits from the business world who were full of vim and vigour about the superiority of the private sector. There was similar enthusiasm for privatization in Bay Street brokerage houses, as well as law and accounting firms, whose services would be needed to carry out the deals.
No comments:
Post a Comment