Transport committee  Thank you for the invitation to join this important discussion. Using the Canada Infrastructure Bank to advance infrastructure privatization and public-private partnerships is deeply misguided and dangerous, and here's why. The CIB's current structure promotes a flawed financing

Transport committee  Thank you. In 2011 Berlin residents and citizen groups had to push for a referendum to publicize the contract for its privatized water services before ending up taking it back into public hands. P3s were a poor model before the pandemic. Now that we have the opportunity to bui

Transport committee  Fundamentally, it comes back to the mandate of the bank itself, and the importance of returning it to build public financing and moving away from engaging in support for privatization and P3s. As I outlined just some of the challenges with P3s earlier, I find it interesting tha

Transport committee  Thanks for that. This is a classic problem with public-private partnerships. When essential infrastructure or services are privately operated, there is also this incentive to bring in or increase user fees over time to create profit. As you mentioned, plans for user fees have bee

Transport committee  I think the short version is that, as I mentioned, the council recognized the very serious risks, some of which I highlighted, when it comes to P3s. In the end, they opted to go public. I want to put this in context, too, because while Mapleton is one important example and very

Transport committee  It's an important question. I think part of it is also about asking who these projects are profitable for. They're certainly not for the local communities, as we've seen from the reports by the Auditor General. I live in Ottawa. For those people who don't live in Ottawa, you m

Transport committee  I think not, if it's continuing down the road of P3s and privatization. What we need to keep in mind is that fundamentally privatization isn't part of the solution. It's a central part of the problem. Also, the deeper problem is neo-liberalism, which is that toxic mix of privatiz

Transport committee  [Inaudible—Editor] and the damage to the public sector that will last for decades—

Transport committee  The pandemic has really laid bare the damages of decades of gutted public services and—

Transport committee  The problem is that they don't. What happens is the private sector gets the reward, and the communities bear the risk. What we've seen in our fundamentally unjust system is that, just to look at the pandemic, billionaires have gained $3.9 trillion, and workers have lost $3.7 tril

Transport committee  I don't agree with the premise that the CIB continuing down the road of privatization and P3s is a foregone conclusion. When the idea was originally announced, it was rooted in public financing, and it could and should be again, as some of the evidence I shared today has highligh

Transport committee  I think the simple answer, in terms of how to make the most of public funds for infrastructure spending, is to stop engaging in P3s and privatization. As I outlined earlier, P3s and privatized projects cost billions of dollars more. If you want to save money, stop doing it.

Transport committee  Well, in my primary area of work around the climate crisis I think about this quite a bit. We've had decades of delay and inaction at the federal level in the face of the climate crisis. It happens in the context of the CIB looking at P3s and privatization, when the P3 and privat

Transport committee  It gets back to what I was talking about earlier concerning the general support for neo-liberal economics. Privatization is part of it, as are deregulation and free trade, and all of these together have led to the climate crisis, the economic inequality we're facing, the inequali

Transport committee  You can cherry-pick from any set of examples on any issue. The evidence is clear that, on the whole, these projects cost more, deliver less and remove democratic control.