Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Alex Silas, and I'm the alternate regional executive vice-president for PSAC, national capital region. I'm here representing roughly 50,000 members in the NCR, most of whom are public servants. I'm also the vice-president of Local 71250, and I work in the downtown core as a security officer in one of our top-level security buildings.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today.
With me is Paul Paquette, vice-president of PSAC—Government Services Union Local 70023 and a stationary engineer at the Cliff Heating Plant, located next to the Supreme Court.
Paul and I both possess secret-level security clearance. Due to the confidential and sensitive nature of our work, we cannot discuss with you certain specific details, but we will cover generalities as best we can. We are here today to share with you our concerns about the proposed plan to privatize five of the centralized heating and cooling plants in the national capital region, along with their pipe and tunnel infrastructure.
The energy services acquisition program modernization plan proposes to accomplish four goals: to improve the government's environmental performance, to reduce costs, to improve the safety and reliability of heating and cooling, and to leverage the private sector's innovation capacity and expertise.
We are interested in working with the government towards achieving the first three of these goals. We would suggest that cutting costs and cutting corners, all too common in the private sector, will have a detrimental effect on improving performance and increasing safety. We contest the fourth goal of seeking out the private sector, as the evidence shows quite clearly that privatizing essential infrastructure, such as these heating plants, does not save money, does not result in better service, and is not in the best interest of the public.
The employer has, on several occasions, promised to provide for review the business case for this project, only to have the delivery date pushed back time after time, unfortunately.
We have three areas of concern with this project.
First, it's a public-private partnership, a P3. There's a significant body of empirical evidence to show that P3s don't save money and don't meet the level of service delivery necessary for quality public services. Governments around the world are bringing similar infrastructure back into the public sector for those reasons.
For example, in Hamilton, Ontario, a water and waste water P3 was brought back into the public sector after homes were flooded, raw sewage was dumped, and cost overruns were out of control. In Paris, France and Stuttgart, Germany, large infrastructure P3 projects for water and other necessary utilities are being brought back into the public sector because they haven't saved money and have failed to provide adequate services. Right here at home, in Ottawa, there have been long delays, cost overruns, and flooding problems with the city's light rail transit, or LRT, another P3 project.
Recently, a report by research and policy analyst Keith Reynolds, written for the Columbia Institute, reviewed 17 P3s in British Columbia. Overwhelming evidence was found that service goals were not met and costs were higher than they would have been in publicly delivered projects, costing the province's taxpayers an additional $3.7 billion.
It is well known that the risk assignment in P3 proposals is often erroneously weighted in favour of the private option, when in fact the public sector can borrow capital funds for less than private companies can, and public sector workers provide better service. Ultimately, governments always remain the sole owners and always underwrite the risk in these situations, regardless of attempts at risk avoidance or risk saving by transferring the responsibility to these private corporations. The public sector always ultimately carries the final risk, and the public will be responsible for picking up the pieces if and when these projects fail, while the private corporation steps away, shuts down, and changes its name. Everything in this country, from sea to sea to sea, is ultimately the responsibility of the Canadian government and the Canadian people.
Our second concern is about ethics in procurement. There are two consortia that have qualified for this project—Innovate Energy and Rideau Energy Partners—and both of these consortia include companies, including SNC-Lavalin, with documented reputations for gross financial mismanagement, substandard service delivery, and accusations of corruption internationally and right here at home in Canada.
The buildings heated by these plants are among Canada's most iconic and most secure, institutions that represent our national well-being. Do we really want to trust the heating and cooling of these historic buildings to greed-driven private operators? Do we really want international corporations that may change hands and change names to have access to our most secure spaces? As a security professional, I can tell you from my experience with privatization in the workplace that we've had repeated problems with private maintenance contractors under-delivering on service calls, providing slow and unreliable responses to emergency maintenance issues, not following protocols, and weakening overall security posture by creating gaps in our systems.
Our third concern, and the reason for these hearings, is that the assumed environmental impacts of these plants are misguided and will not be what they claim to be. We anticipate that there will be potentially devastating impacts on the environment that are not being considered. We are concerned about what will happen if there is a breach of the water pipes. Will this chemically treated water flood the city's sewer system? Will it flow into the Ottawa River? We're concerned about how much additional downtime for emergency repairs will be created to go along with these more time-consuming, low-temp hot-water systems.
We are concerned about the increased load this will put on municipal infrastructure. Considering we already have to switch from natural gas to oil on extremely cold days, would this increased load be feasible for the city? We are concerned about failures of these cooling systems and our top-level secure server rooms. Will that protected data be at risk? We are concerned that this will create a need for additional capacity elsewhere, including stand-alone boilers in individual buildings.
We are deeply concerned about safety, because we've been there. We'll never forget the 2009 explosion that killed one of our members, brother Peter Kennedy, when an uncertified private contractor was servicing a boiler at the Cliff Plant.
We are concerned about the health, safety and security of the workers in these buildings, and buildings like the one we're sitting in right now. Imagine if the heat cuts out on our -30° days. We are concerned about the health, safety and security of the general public, Ottawans who live in the downtown core, local businesses and visitors to our capital.
Instead of rushing into this project, we ask the following. We ask that this be conducted with transparency for the Canadian public. Make public the business case and the environmental case for this project. We ask that the request for proposals be cancelled as it currently exists. We ask that the government meet with the workers, the on-the-ground experts in these plants, our members, so that we may work together on a better plan of upgrades that meet environmental and safety goals. We ask that the RFP then be reissued as design-build only, with public sector workers involved in all aspects of the project, and that the operation and maintenance stay in the hands of trusted public servants. We ask that these plants stay in the public service. Finally, we ask that we as Canadians come together to recognize that, from coast to coast to coast, P3s don't work. Public servants work.
Thank you.