Dear Directors,
We actively support viable hospitals and good quality hospital services, for which both St. Mary’s and Providence care are noted. The P3 proposal is a political problem caused by Infrastructure Ontario and the Provincial Government which we feel weakens our hospitals and the sustainability of public health care.
We are writing to ask you to cease and desist both:
1) your claims that the Health Coalition is fomenting a “coordinated effort to misrepresent the project in the community”, that we have engaged in a “distortion of the truth”, that we are “actively spreading misinformation”, and any other suggestion that we are maliciously lying; and,
2) attempts to intimidate the residents of Kingston with threats of loss of service if they express their support for a publicly funded hospital with non-profit maintenance and administration.
Neither of these assertions are beneficial to improving healthcare in our community.
We welcome public debate and democratic scrutiny about the P3 privatization of the new hospital. Indeed, our whole campaign is an attempt to instill some democracy into the public policy decision to privatize the financing and redevelopment of our hospital. While you are welcome to hold whatever opinion you like about P3 privatization, and to state those opinions wherever you like, the attacks on our integrity and the democratic rights of residents cross the line.
Board spokespersons have stated that the new hospital will be a public hospital. In fact, it will be a P3 hospital, bound into a multi-decade contractual arrangement with for-profit corporations likely covering the maintenance of the hospital, the usage of its lands, the building and patient areas, and the financing of its construction. The Health Coalition has spent the last 12 years researching and following the experience of P3s in Ontario, across Canada and internationally. In our experience, no one who has any kind of serious understanding of P3s actually tries to claim that they do not involve privatization. The industry lobby group for the multinational financiers has defined P3s as follows:
Public-private partnerships span a spectrum of models that progressively engage the expertise or capital of the private sector. At one end, there is straight contracting out as an alternative to traditionally delivered public services. At the other end, there are arrangements that are publicly administered but within a framework that allows for private finance, design, building, operation and possibly temporary ownership of an asset.(emphasis added)
While we disagree with the value-laden language and the glowing terms used to describe the private (for-profit) sector, there is no disputing the fact that P3s are privatization.
Hospital spokespeople have also made some statements that do not withstand the test of public scrutiny. In one, of numerous possible examples, the Niagara P3 hospital is described as a success, which the facts do not support. The hospital just opened, it was more than a year late, and the costs have increased dramatically. The latest documents from Infrastructure Ontario show that the P3 deal commits Ontarians to paying the private sector consortium $1.05 billion. The financier in the consortium, the multinational Deutsche Bank, was caught in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 and was unable to complete the negotiation of the P3 contract to meet commercial and financial close. Eventually, the financier was replaced and the deal was completed much later than scheduled. The hospital is now opening with fewer beds than promised; resulting in much less hospital capacity for much more money.
We could give you literally hundreds of examples of serious problems in privatized P3 projects in Ontario, across Canada and internationally. One resource you may want to look at is University of Manitoba Professor John Loxley’s recent book, “Public Service, Private Profits: The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships in Canada”. For more specific examples of increased cost and inflexibility in Ontario’s P3 or “Alternative Financed and Procurement” hospitals, please read the following 2012 peer reviewed study that examines twenty-three P3 hospitals in Ontario: “Value for money and risk in public–private partnerships”, Siemiatycki, Matti & Farooqi, Naeem, Journal of the American Planning Association, 78:3, Summer 2012, p. 286–299.
We are happy to discuss this matter with you further. We look forward to improving hospital care in the Kingston region through a constructive and respectful debate.
Yours sincerely,
Ross Sutherland,
Chair, Kingston Health Coalition
