NB Liberals steer towards privatized services

Nothing hiding behind a curtain here: this week, the Liberals in New Brunswick promoted privatization and outsourcing of public services as the saviour of all problems in the province.

Promoting a highly revisionist and skewed view of the recent privatizations in BC, the province presented a skewer of speakers, including the biggest proponents and the private beneficiaries of privatization, while completely ignoring the actual (documented) impacts.

Recent auditor general reports from Nova Scotia, BC and Ontario should have upended any ideas that public-private partnerships, privatizations or outsourcing either lead to better services or are cheaper than publicly administrated services.

BC’s history of privatization is particularly bad with estimates of hundreds of millions of dollars wasted replacing public services with private monopolies. Even finance and banking industries are starting to write papers showing the history of outsourcing and privatization simply leads to a transfer of wealth from front-line service providers to middle management resulting in no savings, personal interest-based decisions and deteriorated services.

After all, what manager does not like hiring more managers and more meetings with other managers about overseeing a service they have outsourced, not only the work itself, but also the blame for failure?

More: Ontario audit throws cold water on federal-provincial love affair with P3s

CUPE 1252 invites all to a rally at the Legislature in Fredericton on May 28 starting at 12 noon. The rally is against cuts to healthcare, education, ambulances, government garage, privatization, etc. Please come out and take a stand. Facebook event page.

From What’s Left This Week. Subscribe here.