MONTREAL – Contrary to statements by the management of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Maison de Radio-Canada (MRC) development project is a public-private partnership (P3). The CBC management is justifying its recourse to a P3 for reasons of economy. However, the P3 model is known to be more expensive, which means that it will only worsen the CBC’s financial situation.
Information revealed by the newspaper La Presse has confirmed what CUPE believed from the start. The policy of the Harper government seems to be aimed at the destruction of the CBC, in collusion with some members of the CBC management.
“When you want to kill your dog, you say it has rabies,” says Réal Leboeuf, CUPE union representative. The CBC is reducing its service to citizens by slashing its staff, while at the same time throwing the taxpayers’ money out the window by privatizing the public broadcaster’s assets.”
“The president of the CBC is knowingly binding the corporation with a P3 contract that will seal the financial fate of the public broadcaster. What is the advantage of this? Put the numbers on the table. Major transactions are about to occur, hidden from public view. The public should be outraged by this ill-advised business decision. There is no economic rationale to justify the use of the P3 formula,” asserts CUPE economist Pierre-Guy Sylvestre.
For over a year, CUPE tried to obtain information on what it believed to be a P3, namely the MRC development project. After waiting five months, CUPE finally received a response to its request for access to information concerning the sale of the MRC property.
It was a fruitless exercise. The CBC’s response was a document of nearly 300 pages, three quarters of which were redacted. As provided by the CBC, this document did not really answer any of the questions submitted by CUPE. It seems that La Presse has managed to let the cat out of the bag.
CUPE is demanding that all documents leading to the decision to sell the MRC and the surrounding site to private interests be made public without delay. This is the only way for the CBC shareholders, namely the taxpayers, to know what’s really going on.
CUPE has developed considerable expertise in the analysis of the financial structures known as P3s. “No value analysis or comparison has been made to determine whether privatization was really the way to go. Whether for arenas, as in Beloeil, Sherbrooke, Lévis, Shawinigan and Châteauguay, or for large hospitals like the CHUM, the MUHC and the CHUQ, these P3 projects have given us reason to be wary. We have seen that this type of project can be a hotbed of collusion and corruption. Recently, the Champlain Bridge project, carried out by the federal government as a P3, is suffering from the same problems: lack of transparency and no economic justification for privatization,” notes the CUPE economist.
With more than 111,000 members in Quebec, CUPE represents 9,300 members in the province’s communications sector. CUPE is also present in the following sectors: health and social services, education, universities, energy, municipalities, Quebec government corporations and public agencies, urban and air transport, and the mixed sector.