CUPE has issued a warning about the intention of Christine Fréchette, Coalition avenir Québec, CAQ, leadership contestant, to revive the old and faulty “public-private partnerships”,PPP, for Quebec’s school buildings. Drawing on decades of expertise, CUPE asserts that this model is a total aberration.
Fréchette is essentially proposing to entrust private investors with the construction, ownership and management of Quebec’s schools. The first pitfall is financing: while the Gouvernement du Québec normally finances this kind of infrastructure with public mechanisms at very advantageous rates, private developers or consortia regularly receive financing at much higher rates. As a result, Quebec taxpayers would pick up the tab for the balance, becoming tenants not owners of the infrastructure.
Profits are the second trap. Quebec would be locked into rental leases that would guarantee profits for the owning consortia. In addition to redirecting sales and income taxes toward private profit, in this model, the government would be transferred responsibility when the leases come to term, some 30 years later, for the likely dilapidated buildings.
The third pitfall is lack of transparency. Private contracts tend to be smokescreens for governments to grant favours with convoluted conditions, making it difficult for the media, opposition parties and, above all, the general public to document. Further, these contracts can prove to be an accounting trick to conceal public debts, since such leases are generally not calculated in provincial debt.
“Put bluntly, PPPs in school-infrastructure management reek of scheming,” said Patrick Gloutney, president of CUPE Québec. “This model means fewer expenses now, but guarantees that taxpayers pay much more over the term of the contract. It weakens Quebec’s public services and the State, and it favours large private consortia. It would also deprive the public network of much-needed funds to keep existing schools in good repair, and it shows a lack of respect for public school staff, who are denied the means to do their jobs properly. It undermines the very role of the State. Unfortunately, with Fréchette, this is nothing new: We saw the same tendency when she was the minister responsible for Hydro-Québec. For example, the 2035 Action Plan and the wind turbine dossier presented the same harmful logic of forfeiting strategic assets to the private sector.”