P3 vote passes smell test
One newsroom wag suggested I should be gloating over the No side’s victory in Wednesday’s referendum, given my support for the public-private partnership (P3) model for the city’s waste water treatment plant. In all honesty, nothing could be further from the truth. Far from gloating, I feel humbled that the citizens of Regina proved me wrong by coming out in droves to vote on Wednesday. One of my biggest fears about this referendum was that a small percentage of voters would end up overturning a unanimous decision of council eight months earlier. As it turned out, the turnout on Wednesday (just over 49,000 voters cast ballots) was almost as big as the municipal election last fall (51,000).
That came as a huge surprise to me (as evidenced by my dismal showing in the office pool. I was only 21,000 voters off). Not only was I wrong about the turnout, I was wrong to dismiss the value of referendums as a means of deciding major issues of the day. Far from being a travesty of democracy, the referendum helped crystallize the issue in the minds of most voters and forced citizens to inform themselves of the differences between P3s and conventional publicly financed designbid-build infrastructure projects.
Many commentators, including yours truly, also questioned the half-a-million-dollar price tag for holding a referendum less than a year after the municipal election, which itself was about a year and half from the provincial and federal elections. People are tired of voting in elections, we said, give us a break and let our elected representatives decide the issue.
Well, God help us if we ever get so jaded that we tire of voting in elections. You don’t have to look very far to find places where people are fighting and dying for the right we increasingly take for granted and often dismiss as meaningless.
Of course, deciding how (not whether) to build a sewage treatment plant might not be the most exciting or inspiring election issue there’s ever been. Frankly, this might have been one of those rare issues better decided by city council, after studying all the options and getting the advice of city administration and other experts.
Having said that, citizens have the right to petition their elected representatives to vote on a pressing issue of the day.
It’s not for me or anyone else to decide which issues are valid, and which ones aren’t.
Some might have argued the city clerk’s ruling — that the 24,000-signature petition was insufficient — was sufficient reason to scrap the referendum altogether and dare Regina Water Watch to take the city to court. However, Mayor Michael Fougere and council, wisely as it turns out, decided to accept the petition as valid. In so doing, they had to accept the petition question, which wasn’t about P3s at all, but in favour of DBBs.
This could have proved disastrous for the city, since it’s always more difficult to campaign against something than for something.
That said, Fougere and council did an admirable job of defending the P3 concept and arguing against the DBB model for this particular project. The mayor kept his cool and kept to the facts.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the role that Regina Water Watch played in this debate. It goes without saying that the referendum wouldn’t have happened without Regina Water Watch and its dedicated band of volunteers, who spent months circulating the petition and came within 7,000 votes of victory on Wednesday night.
While I disagree with its position and some of its tactics, I respect its right to force a public debate on an important, if little understood, area of public policy. No doubt, Regina Water Watch will keep the city’s feet to the fire as the P3 project progresses towards completion.
But the real winners in the referendum were the people of Regina. They engaged in the debate, learned and argued about P3s, DBBs, and esoteric concepts, like ‘value for money’ accounting, risk transfer, interest rate spreads on public and private-sector borrowing, etc.
As Mayor Fougere said Wednesday night, the people have spoken and the people are always right. Amen to that.