Marois to make Transport an arm’s-length agency
Depending on whom you listen to, transforming the Transport Department into an arm’s length government agency has the potential to be a vast improvement or simply window dressing.
Premier Pauline Marois said this week the move will “ensure the integrity, transparency and efficiency” of a government operation that this fiscal year will spend $3.9 billion on roadwork, including $585 million in the Montreal area. The department manages and maintains 29,000 kilometres of roads, 4,700 bridges and overpasses and has faced allegations of price-fixing and influence peddling in contracts.
On Thursday Marois explained that her newly-named transport minister, Jonquière MNA Sylvain Gaudreault — who has no experience in transport and was the Parti Québécois critic for education and literacy in the last legislature — will not be in charge of the Transport portfolio as it is now configured for very long.
“We will create an agency, which does not have the same consequences in terms of daily management since a board of directors will be named and there are other rules that apply,” she said.
Giving Gaudreault the added responsibility for Municipal Affairs is perfectly logical, she said, since much of the province’s road network is managed by municipalities.
“The big areas for investments in transport, whether it is public transit or road transport, concern the big cities in Quebec, so there is a very clear logic that it fall under same (minister’s) responsibility.” But Gaudreault will be relieved of most administrative duties of the Transport portfolio as soon as the new government creates the transport agency, Marois said.
Gabriel Assaf, a professor of engineering and construction at the École de technologie supérieure in Montreal, said the creation of a Quebec transport agency is “excellent news.”
Right now, the Transport Department distributes funds for roadwork to 14 regional directorates that in turn decide how the money is spent, he noted. “Politicians decide, ‘We’re going to do this road or that one,’ ” he said. “In other words, politicians are not the right ones to manage this money because they will use it to further their own interests.”
It is crucial the new agency’s board have non-government and non-political transport and transit experts on it, he advised.
Thierry Giasson, a professor of political communication at the Université Laval, said the change should put the “enormous contracts (of the Transport Department) at a distance so that they can’t be politically manipulated.”
He said that two arm’s-length government bodies in British Columbia, Translink and the B.C. Transportation Financing Authority, are good examples of how “there can be a fiefdom” enshrining near- and long-term goals that make sense and protect the agency’s employees from politicians’ wills.
A major public-sector union, the Syndicat de la fonction publique et parapublique du Québec, said turning Transport Quebec into an agency could exacerbate “corruption currently plaguing Transport Quebec.”
The union said it fears Quebec will delegate decision-making authority to a body outside the public service. That body could become a hotbed of favouritism, given billions of dollars at stake, the union warned.