Eastern Passages

Russell Wangersky ponders whether provinces should pool resources.

It’s something that’s probably going to come to a whole range of public services in this region soon.

The four Atlantic provinces have called a tender for the centralized production of drivers’ licences for all four provinces. The idea is that a centralized facility will be able to produce cheaper and more technologically advanced drivers’ licences, allowing the provinces to get rid of current technology and use privately contracted equipment instead.

The provinces are also looking for enhanced facial recognition capability, along with the ability to handle smart chip technology in the future, much like that used by debit and credit cards now.

They want facial recognition features that will recognize if someone applies for two licences, and catches fraud before licences are even printed, thanks to an image database potentially dating back to 2006.

There are also requirements for security features secret enough that the provinces don’t even want them disclosed in the tenders, and revealed only to select personnel: “The manufacturing process of the cards must provide for the inclusion of one third level security feature, which is embedded within the card body and accessible for verification ONLY through destruction of the card and the use of specialized forensic examination equipment.”

In other words, the provinces want to vastly update the technical content of drivers’ licences, but without each having to buy the expensive equipment needed to supply the improvements.

You can understand it. You can also understand why, building on a combined drivers’ licence materials program started in 2005 (something the provinces claim resulted in “significant economic benefit for each province through a substantial increase in purchasing power”), the four provinces believe they can get an even better deal on the new licences by working as a group.

Argue about the value of private-sector involvement if you want to — whether it would be better to amalgamate services across several provinces but leave profit-taking private businesses out of the mix.

But you can’t argue that provinces, and the federal government as well, shouldn’t try to find economies of scale that will make better use of scarce tax dollars. It’s also reasonable to suggest that buying expensive new hardware — instead of contracting out to suppliers who already have it — simply doesn’t make sense.

In January, the federal government joined a buying group of Canadian provinces and territories that was negotiating lower prices for name-brand and generic drugs. Buying in a block meant, arguably, being able to negotiate better prices.

The logic is clear: the more you’re buying, the better the deal you can make. And your contract suddenly is much more valuable to a supplier looking to find an anchor client.

In Newfoundland, concerns were expressed about the potential loss of jobs at motor vehicle registration, despite assurances that wouldn’t happen in the government’s news release.

And there’s something else to think about, as well.

Even though the contract specifies that all personal information has to be held within this country under strict security, presumably to keep it from foreign governments or hackers, the idea of a private company controlling the biometric images and personal information of every single licenced driver in the Atlantic region is more than a little alarming.

But it’s going to happen in a whole range of services, especially in IT and data storage, and in specialized and expensive technologies from the healthcare sector, to education and beyond.

Trying to protect that wealth of information and at the same time putting it in private hands is a major concern that we might not want to accept so quickly.