Privatization Roulette
I was pretty excited to hear that we’re going to privatize some government crown corporations.
When was the last time we did that in Canada? How refreshing, compared to the American tendency these days to nationalize stuff (but only if they are bleeding money).
What kills me about the privatization debate is the “timing” issue everybody always brings up.
And nobody brings up timing to “promote” privatization, only to stop it.
- If a government-owned corporation is losing money, then it’s bad timing to sell it. Who wants to buy something that’s losing money?
- If a government-owned corporation is making money, then it’s bad timing to sell it – it’s helping Government revenues, not hindering them.
- If it’s breaking even, it’s off the radar completely – nobody’s complaining about it, so let’s leave it be.
Either privatization is a good economic idea, or it’s not. And if it is a good idea, then it should be generally pursued for it’s inherent benefits, not selectively, ineffectually, or half-heartedly (see BC Ferries), because nobody wants to rock the boat.
This doesn’t mean I favour a fire sale – just implementing a preparation plan, and guiding an orderly process.
Think about the privatization of Air Canada and Petro-Canada. Regardless of your opinion on these organizations in the past or present, you’ll have to admit their privatizations were the correct policy, economically beneficial, a net positive for government revenues, and not a fire sale.
I found great irony in the fact that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is buying the company that runs the UK National Lottery. Let’s think about this for a minute. The pension plan for public school teachers in Ontario is buying a privatized lottery operator in another country.
And Maclean’s features an article this week (in their print edition) about how keen the Conservative government is to NOT privatize Canada Post.
I can’t wait to see what it is we WILL privatize.
AECL is a great start, but there’s oh so much more!
How about the airports? Our pension plans keep buying these up all over the rest of the world.
How about the CBC? OK, maybe there’s something not worth buying.
How about the Royal Canadian Mint? They can spend somebody else’s money finding lost gold that isn’t lost.
If not, why not? Is it bad timing?
Support Competitive Electricity Market: Vote Green?!?
According to their large collection of YouTube videos, the BC NDP doesn’t have much to say about the economy.
Even the one called Carole James on the Economy says something vague about putting working people first. I don’t know what this means (I presume this is code for some socialist ideal, but I’m not sure). What I am sure about is that nothing in this video (or any of the others) have anything to do with the economy. I think Gary Mason says it best in the Globe and Mail. When it comes to the economy, James is simply out of her depth. Is she hoping that this election will end up being about something else?
The NDP is on about Gordon Campbell wanting to privatize everything and the kitchen sink (the NDP believes the kitchen sink is an important public asset). This NDP anti-privatization rant wants to ensure you that hospitals are not built by private companies, and making sure that BC Hydro doesn’t get privatized by those evil BC Liberals.
If only this last point was remotely true, man would that motivate me – I’d be far more excited about the BC Liberals!
- The latest example of BC Liberal support for the BC Hydro monopoly states that they will “[develop] the proposed Site C Hydroelectric dam in Northern B.C. as a public asset, owned by BC Hydro.”
- As mentioned, the NDP is pretty clear about their love for BC Hydro – the bigger and publicker BC Hydro, the better.
- Even the tiny BC Conservative Party has a policy that states “BC Hydro will not be disposed of without the permission of the voting public via referendum.” (PDF)
- Want free market economics? Look to the long-haired hippies in the Green Party:
BC Greens will foster the building of green and clean, renewable energy facilities with an emphasis on co-operative and municipally-owned utilities, while providing the opportunity for private producers and transmission operators to participate in a mixed public / private energy system.
Private transmission operators? What the hell is this, Europe!?
Independent power producers are nimble, innovative, and generally “greener”. BC Hydro and its powerful union has done everything possible to put the brakes on these energy alternatives and innovations at every turn. Gordon Campbell has taken some baby steps to reign in the 800-pound gorilla (or, in NDP-speak, MASSIVE PRIVATIZATION), by freeing up private energy producers to operate in BC, but to a very limited degree.
More should be done! Perhaps Gordon Campbell could take a page out of the Green Party’s radical free market approach.
CBC Cuts: A Good Start?
The CBC has cut 800 jobs. I know what it’s like to lose a job, and empathize with anyone who loses theirs.
This post is not to celebrate the job loss aspect of the news. But it does reflect the continued diminishment of the CBC. The reality is that the CBC has been diminishing for years.
While this stop-gap measure comes at an unfortunate time (job losses are rarely “welcome”, mind you), it is directly a result of inaction on the part of government in dealing with the CBC sooner.
Better late than never … now is prime time for the government to come up with an ACTUAL PLAN on what to do with the CBC.
There are lots of good ideas out there. Macleans.ca had some great ideas. You could split up the TV and Radio into a Canadian PBS and NPR, then lower public funding over the course of a decade. You could just shut down the unprofitable TV operations all together, and continue to fund radio only. I even had a few ideas submitted on my Privatize.ca site a few years back. In better times, you could’ve privatized parts of it (sadly, that option is off the table for now).
Fact is, there are dozens of possible solutions, but successive governments have chosen the lamest option of all: do nothing and hope for the best.
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