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Toronto’s trinity of privatization

It was a very telling week at City Hall. The “P” word has begun to creep into the budget deliberations.

Yes, folks. We finally have some hint of which services Rob Ford’s crew is looking to sell-off, contract out or otherwise remove from the city’s bottom line.

The privatization of everything from the building of parks and rec infrastructure, the sell off of the Toronto Parking Authority (possibly) and the contracting out of curbside garbage pick up (which we heard about during the election), is on the table. Maybe childcare, too. Can Wheel-Trans be far behind?

There may be more, given the ambitious (some might say unrealistic) cost-cutting agenda this mayor has given council to meet, not only this year, but when the real bloodletting begins in 2012 and beyond. There’ll be no $300 million-plus surplus to soften the financial blow then.

Where the roulette wheel of privatization will stop, nobody knows. Ford’s crew has its eager band of salesmen in not-so-cheap suits, ready to make a deal.

Behind door number one it’s Giorgio Mammoliti, chair of the Community Development and Recreation Committee, who wants the Community Development committee he chairs to set up a task force to look into public-private partnerships as a way of building new parks and rec facilities, specifically ice rinks.

Apparently, Mammoliti has been up late nights acquainting himself with the work of the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance, a group that includes former PM Paul Martin, and is dedicated to public-private partnerships “designed to ignite the development of an investment marketplace.”

Lovers of the great Canadian pastime may have no quarrel with more ice rinks, except Mammoliti wants his proposed task force to cast its net wider and look into redrawing the city’s current policies on P3 investment agreements.

The sky’s the limit it seems. In another motion to be tabled at Friday’s Community Development committee, Mammoliti recommends the city investigate “diversifying childcare delivery models.” The city currently manages the second largest child care system in the country, some 24,000 subsidized spaces.

Behind door number two, budget chief Mike Del Grande may have have his own pet privatization project in mind. He didn’t come right out and say it, but seemed to be suggesting during budget meetings last week, that the Parking Authority could be on the auction block.

At least, that’s what former budget chief Shelley Carroll took from Del Grande’s attempts to “devalue” the TPA, as Carroll puts it, during questions he had for staff on the Authority’s return on investment. Del Grande tried to suggest that number was miniscule, less than one hundreth of one per cent.

Bullocks, says Carroll, who says the Authority returned some $383 million in operating dollars to the city over the four years that she was budget chief, and that’s without counting the 25 per cent that went to cover the Authority’s own operating expenses.

Smaller government obsessions may be blinding the new administration calling the shots at City Hall. Why they would want to jettison a cash cow like the Authority?

Wouldn’t seem to make financial sense, but then the Ford administration wants to privatize curbside garbage pickup, too.

The mayor and his supporters have been quick to jump on the fallout from the 2009 garbage strike as rationale for privatization.

In reality, though, complaints about garbage service are still below the Ontario average in Toronto, and remained below average during the strike year, Carroll points out, despite a bump in complaints then.

Carroll says any plan to contract out won’t bring anywhere near the kind of savings Ford and Co. might think.

Any deal to contract out garbage, Carroll notes, “would have to be very narrow in scope and loaded with stated conditions regarding taking on future diversion commitments. This would not be the bonanza solid waste biz types are salivating over.”

Unless, that is, the current regime wants to completely abandon waste diversion goals. Makes you wonder.

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