Despite pledges, how will parties build new Civic?
Doug Ford and Andrea Horwath would both build a new Civic campus for The Ottawa Hospital, their parties promised Monday, answering a Liberal attack that neither the Progressive Conservatives nor the New Democrats specifically mention the $2-billion project in any of their previous promises.
Plans for a major new hospital to replace the century-old Civic building have been in the works for a decade. The Ottawa Hospital has leased federal land near Dow’s Lake and begun work on design concepts.
“We cannot take this new hospital for granted,” Ottawa Centre Liberal Yasir Naqvi said in a brief news conference on the lawn just off Carling Avenue on Monday afternoon. Ottawa South’s John Fraser and Nepean’s Lovina Srivastava looked on sombrely.
“Frankly, it comes down to the fact that we are concerned. Our party is the only party in this election that has committed to the construction of this new hospital,” Naqvi said.
Bull, Ottawa’s top Tory Lisa MacLeod replied immediately on Twitter. A Progressive Conservative government “will continue to support the new Civic Campus as I have always done.” The Liberals must be desperate, she said. Perhaps they’ve seen a recent poll.
NDP headquarters in Toronto fired out a short response of their own: “It is right there in our platform in black, white and orange — the NDP are committed to investing $19 billion over 10 years to upgrade, expand and build new hospitals all across the province, including the new Ottawa Civic Hospital Campus,” it said.
The platform doesn’t mention the Civic specifically, but if the money wasn’t promised before, it is now.
The more interesting question is just how an NDP government would build it. Especially if their candidate Joel Harden is elected in Ottawa Centre, which includes both the old hospital and the site for its replacement.
Harden was busy canvassing on Monday but he’s on record criticizing the planned location for the new campus. Property developers drove that decision, he says, and it’s contrary to the National Capital Commission’s conclusion that Tunney’s Pasture is the best piece of federal land for it.
(The people who run the hospital, it’s worth noting, don’t agree. They wanted land directly across Carling Avenue from the current Civic but were OK with the compromise of property a few hundred metres east.)
Harden has also promised to stop any plan to build the hospital the way the Liberals have pursued every construction project of any size in the last few years: as a public-private partnership. (Or, as the government’s jargon puts it, an “alternative financing and procurement” project, or “AFP.”)
The New Democrats’ platform doesn’t precisely rule these out but it does say a government Horwath leads would “focus on public projects instead of wasteful public-private partnerships.”
Naqvi pulled out the current Liberal line on the New Democrats: They’re basically communists.
“Here’s our concern,” Naqvi said. “(The) NDP is an ideological party. They oppose the AFP model purely based on their ideology, whereas our focus is practical, to get things built that’s going to improve the quality of life for Ontarians and, of course, most importantly for us, the citizens of Ottawa.”
AFP projects often have contracts that are so complicated they’re practically opaque. When the Liberals make these deals, particularly with companies that have lobbied them and donated money to their campaigns, it looks shady.
The Liberals stand behind all their public-private partnerships, the candidates outside the old Civic said Monday. Ottawa’s light-rail system is one example. The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre is another. So too are a major renovation at the Heart Institute and expansions to the Montfort Hospital and the cancer centre at The Ottawa Hospital’s General campus on Smyth Road.
Bad public-private partnerships were popular in the early 2000s because they meant governments could build things they couldn’t immediately afford and pay them off over time — but, and this was the important part, the deals showed up on the books as things like service and maintenance contracts instead of debt.
We paid extra so governing parties could make their budgets look healthier than they really were. Gross.
But done well, these projects import private-sector incentives into public-sector projects. The City of Ottawa is doing this with its light-rail project: the Rideau Transit Group consortium building it is borrowing money from private lenders to cover some of the costs. That gets bankers breathing down the builders’ necks to hit milestones, which could be much more effective than if it’s just bureaucrats doing it.
Ontario’s auditor general Bonnie Lysyk reported in 2014 that the provincial government had spent $8 billion on these arrangements, spread across 75 projects worth $26 billion in construction costs. If we assume that all of those would have been finished on time and on budget if the government had managed them, that’s $8 billion down the drain.
The premise is that the government has a lousy record of delivering megaprojects on time and on budget. In theory it could do better, but historically it hasn’t. The extra cost is a waste in the way that insurance is a waste if your house never burns down or you never get into a car crash.
So will the new Civic get built? Probably, yes, if only because stopping it now would be lethal for any party’s hopes in Ottawa in the election after this one. But all three major parties display their pathologies when they talk about it:
We don’t know for sure how the Tories would pay for it.
The Liberals don’t see why they get criticized for building things using a secretive process people can’t understand.
And the New Democrats are against a tool that, despite its weaknesses, does actually seem to work.