Here again is the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) which is happily dipping into public finances, this time to throw in $2.6 billion for the Île d’Orléans bridge, previously estimated at 400-600 million, for the sector. private. This is only possible if all risks of cost overruns are left to the private sector. It does the same analyzes of technical quotes, risks and estimated costs as the Ministry of Transport, but it invoices it all in advance, regardless of whether they were necessary or relevant. The expertise of the ministry is no longer required, and it will not be able to manage the work in any way, nor continue to develop and improve its own expertise, in particular by hiring the best engineers and experts. He will only have to sign checks made from our income addressed to the “chosen”, often unique, consortium.
Our brilliant CAQ ministers, like the Liberals for decades, readily abandon government technical expertise in public works to channel money to the private construction sector. It will be noted that the procedure regularly includes a return of elected officials to the private sector after their political “career”.
It is a waste of our taxes, in addition to those of state monopolies, which benefits a few private players at a high price, with the added bonus of the constant loss of our government expertise in industrial and technical matters, and even the weakness of that in IT management, but also the loss of the capacity to evolve towards best practices. The State must, however, encourage these practices, and not those imposed on it by a quasi-monopoly in the private sector. From the liberal “public-private” partnership, we moved to “all-private” with the CAQ.
We must radically change methods and take control of our own national management of major works. And our public finances, as well as our government expertise in all areas. They are not cookie jars intended for CAQ MPs and ministers to make large-scale electoral gifts or simply massive transfers to the private sector for lack of imagination, knowledge or leadership. A minister is not a CEO, and a state is simply not a “multinational”, on an economic level, like any other… We must be against this constant privatization of Quebec. And this government mismanagement.