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A new report is urging the Trudeau Liberals to make their new, experimental infrastructure bank a centre for helping cities and provinces sell off existing assets, rather than just helping to build new infrastructure.
The C.D. Howe Institute says the Liberals, along with provinces, territories and cities, could raise between $67-$100 billion by selling off revenue-generating assets like airports that would be attractive to private sector investors.
The Liberals have been considering whether to sell off stakes in Canada's airports, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said last week, adding that it is part of an ongoing discussion around what assets the government should continue to own.
The paper says the Liberals should also consider allowing domestic or foreign investors to cover the full price for projects, absent public funding.
Benjamin Dachis, the institute's associate director of research and the author of the paper, says the Liberals should also provide provincial and municipal governments with financial incentives to work with the proposed bank.
The bank would use $35 billion in federal cash and financing to pull into four times that amount from the private sector, if all goes according to plan, to help pay for new construction projects.
"Government spending has its inevitable limits, and government ownership of much of Canada’s major infrastructure is limiting the ability of governments to invest in the new infrastructure Canadians need," Dachis writes.
"A systematic policy in which governments seek to broaden the ownership of Canada’s billions of dollars of government user-fee supported assets would address this problem. It would also open investment opportunities for institutional investors keen to invest in Canadian infrastructure."
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Many of these Think Tanks and
Many of these Think Tanks and university professors are paid to promote the agendas of businesses. They are lobbyists engaging in a fraud by pretending otherwise.
The Canadian Wheat Board was sold to Saudi Arabia for pennies on the dollar and the only deep water northern port, in Churchill Manitoba demanded millions in subsidies to stay open once it was privatized, which they got. The following year they again demanded subsidies and when denied, they closed the port as well as the railway. Locals begged government to buy it back and sell it to them, but were ignored. There is no government presence in the north - not even a Coast Guard base. China doesn't recognize Canadian sovereignty in The Northwest Passage and says it will soon begin shipping through it, despite not having even asked for permission, yet the PM can't do enough to encourage their despots to buy up Canada. Privatizing any public service outrageous. Sell airports and staff will be cut to the bone, including security, since profit is literally all that matters. If they don't make enough profit (there is never enough) they can extort subsidies over threats to close runways. The monopoly would be permanent since most cities haven't the space or billions required to build another airport from scratch.
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