Public Private Partnership (P3) for East Gwillimbury: Oppose Position, History
As East Gwillimbury grows faster than almost any municipality in York Region, we’ll face constant pressure to find “innovative” ways to pay for infrastructure. One idea that I’ve heard floated is the Public-Private Partnership, (P3): bringing in a private company to finance, build, and often operate public infrastructure, a recreation centre, water infrastructure, a road, in exchange for long-term payments from the town. Public-Private Partnerships have been tried in Canada, and in the United States, they are popular, especially with building toll roads.
I want to be direct: I do not support Public-Private Partnership arrangements for East Gwillimbury, and if elected Mayor, I will not pursue them for our town’s core infrastructure. And let me tell you why.
History of Public-Private Partnership, Look at the Track Record
Public-Private Partnerships are pitched as a way to get shovels in the ground faster without hitting the tax base. But Ontario and Canada have a real track record with this model, and it isn’t good.
Ottawa’s light-rail line is the clearest cautionary tale in the country. Built under a Public-Private Partnership model, the Confederation Line suffered years of sinkholes, lawsuits, trapped workers, malfunctioning doors, and system failures so severe that riders were seen climbing fences to escape stalled trains, bad enough to trigger a public inquiry.
Nova Scotia’s Public-Private Partnership schools show how the model can quietly erode accountability, not just drive up costs. A 2010 review of 39 Public-Private Partnership schools found the contracts weren’t adequate to protect the public interest; there wasn’t even a requirement for criminal record checks on subcontractors working around children.
BC’s Golden Ears Bridge undercuts the core Public-Private Partnership sales pitch that private financing insulates taxpayers from risk. When the financial crisis hit, the private backers came close to defaulting outright, requiring a foreign government bailout of their parent bank to keep the financing alive.
Alberta’s Public-Private Partnership schools program saw a key private partner lose nearly all its stock value and slash a quarter of its workforce during the financial crisis, leaving school infrastructure tangled up with a partner in serious distress.*
Even the “faster” argument doesn’t hold up. BC’s publicly financed Millennium Line was running within three years; the Public-Private Partnership-financed Canada Line took eight; the Public-Private Partnership Evergreen Line was delayed a decade past approval.
This isn’t just critics talking. Ontario’s own Auditor General has found that the “risk transfer” savings used to justify Public-Private Partnerships are often inflated without evidence, specifically to make the Public-Private Partnership option look better on paper.
Closer to home, the Township of Mapleton looked at privatizing its water infrastructure through a Public-Private Partnership and walked away, concluding it was too risky for a small municipality. That’s the judgment I’ll bring to this decision as Mayor.
Ten Things Any P3 Proposal Must Prove Before I’d Even Consider It
I don’t support Public-Private Partnerships for East Gwillimbury’s core infrastructure, full stop. But residents should understand exactly what’s typically missing from these deals when other municipalities sign them, because it’s the same list of gaps every time.
Accountability Framework: A P3 needs defined mechanisms that assign responsibility to both the public and private side for outcomes, spending, and service delivery. In practice, most P3 contracts blur that line on purpose, so that when something goes wrong, town staff and Council are left explaining a failure they didn’t have the authority to prevent.
Risk Allocation: The whole sales pitch behind a Public-Private Partnership is that financial, operational, and reputational risk gets pushed onto the private partner. Golden Ears Bridge and the Alberta schools program show what happens when that risk allocation is tested by a real financial shock: the private side comes back looking for a bailout, and the public side is still on the hook regardless.
Contract Transparency: Residents deserve to see the actual terms and performance metrics of any partnership agreement, not a summary. A P3 structure is built around commercial confidentiality clauses that keep the real numbers out of public meetings and off the council agenda entirely.
Infrastructure Delivery: Using private sector capacity to plan, build, or maintain roads, water systems, and community facilities sounds efficient on paper. But Ottawa’s Confederation Line and the Evergreen Line’s decade-long delay prove that private delivery doesn’t reliably mean faster or better delivery.
Value for Money Assessment: Every P3 is supposed to clear a formal value for money assessment before it’s approved, a real comparison against traditional public procurement. Ontario’s Auditor General has already found that the “savings” behind these assessments are frequently inflated to make the P3 option win on paper, which makes the assessment itself the thing residents should be most skeptical of.
Public Interest Safeguards: Provisions to stop private profit motives from overriding community needs, access, or service quality have to be built into a contract from day one, not added after a problem surfaces. Nova Scotia’s P3 schools didn’t even require criminal record checks on subcontractors working around children, proof that “public interest” isn’t automatically protected just because a public building gets built.
Stakeholder Consultation: Residents, Council, and affected community groups need a real process to weigh in before a partnership is formed, not just community feedback collected after the deal is signed. My opponent’s openness to exploring P3s for arenas, ice pads, and arts and culture facilities is exactly the kind of decision that deserves full public consultation before any request for proposals goes out, not after.
Performance Monitoring: Ongoing measurement of whether a private partner is meeting agreed service standards has to continue for the life of the contract, sometimes 20 to 30 years. A Council elected today can commit to performance standards that six future Councils will have to enforce without ever having negotiated the original agreement.
Long-Term Fiscal Commitment: The multi-decade financial obligations a municipality takes on with a P3 affect every future capital budget, whether or not the current Council fully grasps that at signing. Real fiscal responsibility means asking what a deal costs residents twenty years from now, not just whether it avoids a tax increase this term.
Conflict of Interest Controls: Rules and disclosures preventing improper relationships between town officials and a private partner organization have to be airtight, given how much discretion a P3 hands the private side over the life of the contract. That’s a governance risk East Gwillimbury doesn’t need to take on when disciplined, direct public investment is available instead.
Position on Public-Private Partnership
Residents deserve to know where every candidate stands before East Gwillimbury signs a contract that could bind the town for 20-30 years. My opponent has been clear that he doesn’t share my view, committing to actively explore Public-Private Partnerships for infrastructure like arenas, ice pads, and arts and culture facilities. As is the case with most Public-Private Partnership arrangements, it’s the public side that assumes the risk and the private side assumes the profit. After seeing what Public-Private Partnerships have actually delivered in Ottawa, Nova Scotia, Alberta, and BC, I don’t believe East Gwillimbury should be the next case study. This is where experience and education help cut through the siren call of promises of less costly infrastructure projects.
Public-Private Partnership Fiscal Responsibility and Integrity
My platform rests on four pillars: Affordability, Economic Development, Responsible Growth and Community Safety, anchored by fiscal responsibility and integrity in governance. Opposing Public-Private Partnerships flows directly from those commitments.
Real fiscal responsibility means looking past the appeal of “no money down” financing to what a decision costs residents over 20-30 years, not just one term of Council. It means keeping decision-making, and its full cost, not locked behind a private contract that outlasts several Councils, with elected officials accountable to residents. And it means transparency: residents deserve to know how their tax dollars are spent and who’s accountable when something goes wrong. A Public-Private Partnership structure, by design, makes that harder.
Disciplined, Direct Investment, Not Public-Private Partnership
East Gwillimbury doesn’t need to outsource its infrastructure financing to get amenities built. We need disciplined asset management planning, development charges that make growth pay for growth, and a Council willing to make hard trade-offs openly rather than hide them in a private contract.
Every major capital project, from a recreational facility to a transportation network upgrade, should move through the Committee of the Whole and full Council in the open, with a genuine site plan, a real budget detail breakdown, and a project background residents can actually read before staff bring a recommendation forward. That’s a slower process than a private partner promising a fast track, but it’s the process that keeps this town, and our Official Plan, in our own hands, not tied up in provincial legislation disputes or an appeal at the Ontario Land Tribunal over a deal residents never got to weigh in on.
I’ve spent eight years on Council doing the unglamorous work of municipal finance because that groundwork protects taxpayers over the long run. That’s the approach I’ll bring to the Mayor’s chair: build our infrastructure openly and responsibly, with an eye on who pays the bill twenty years from now. From an early age, my parents taught me to save up for something I wanted and not to buy anything I couldn’t afford. It still makes sense today, even more so with your tax dollars.
In this campaign, I’ve been very careful about not promising anything I can’t deliver or something the taxpayer can’t afford.
East Gwillimbury’s growth is an opportunity. Let’s pay for it in a way that keeps this town’s future in our own hands.
By Scott Crone, Ward Councillor and Candidate for Mayor
