Panel on P3s bad idea

At first, panels of experts always sound like a good idea for improving the quality of government decision-making. This is especially so in the modern era, which tends not to view politicians themselves as, um, the smartest clauses in a contract.

Alberta Tory leadership candidate Thomas Lukaszuk’s proposal of a body of legal and financial wizards to negotiate publicprivate partnerships (P3s) for new infrastructure such as schools is an excellent example of the positive first glance.

These deals, in which municipalities and school boards are the ultimate owners of the project, but leverage private sector skills and capital to build, manage and maintain them, are complex financial arrangements. Seduced by the possibility of getting new facilities without raising debt, taxes or capital spending, politicians do risk stumbling into deals that can eventually prove more expensive than an old-fashioned public tender.

So why not organize taxpayers’ own team of deal-making specialists and make them available to work out details on a level playing field with their high-paid counterparts in the big corporations that are often involved on the privatesector side of the P3 equation?

But the idea is fundamentally flawed — by the assumption that “experts” will be accepted by everyone as dispassionate and neutral, and by the underlying misconception that there is always a scientific “correct” answer to a technical or mathematical question if the right smart person is engaged to find it.

In the real world, of course, there are “experts and experts,” and a healthy popular reluctance to take their word at face value. Climate change is currently the most notorious example of this problem, in which non-scientific people who dislike evidence that mankind is causing global warming round up their own experts to say something more pleasing.

In field after field the story is the same. The findings of an “expert” panel of economists depend on which economists have been chosen to participate; underlying assumptions can utterly change recommendations about what policy might be most advantageous.

In Alberta, skepticism about a P3 panel would inevitably be aggravated by the fact the government, which is known to think they are a good idea in principle, will be choosing the experts who will evaluate the proposals.

The long-ruling Progressive Conservative politicians have a well-earned reputation for using boards, panels and advisory bodies as political cover for contentious decisions.

In the case of the current proposal, you can almost hear the politicians letting themselves off the hook on a controversial P3: “We weren’t sure it made financial sense either, but our outside experts assured us it was the way to go.”

In fairness to Lukaszuk, the would-be premier seems to be responding to allegations of poor P3 choices, and implicitly admitting that past Conservative governments may have been too ideological, or at too least uncritical in their initial love affair with the idea. He probably intends his idea to be a judicious retreat, rather than a way of getting more P3s approved.

But if he really wants that kind of change, he should simply say he thinks there has been too much pressure for P3s, and that he recognizes they are just another — and in some cases possibly more expensive — form of public debt.

We don’t need another group of Tory-appointed experts.