The private sector will unclog hospitals. The private will make students smarter. The private will save the planet. Suddenly, during this fall provincial election campaign, “the private” is the panacea. Really ?
At least three of the five main parties in the running have presented the private sector as a solution to the limits of the public health and education systems over the past two weeks: the CAQ, the PLQ and the PCQ. Very few, if any opponents seemed to balk.
So what is “private” exactly? It obviously depends on who is using the expression. Beyond the nature of the clinics where doctors will eventually be able to practice, there is a whole technological aspect that also requires reflection.
In any case, over the past four years, the CAQ government has repeatedly spoken of the potential that there would be in certain sectors, such as health and education, to make more room for private technologies. Its ministers have on several occasions given the example of how certain technological companies could benefit from access to all this data that it is possible to generate if the information produced by public health were digitized a little more.
Public private data
Anonymized and then aggregated, this data becomes large enough to be referred to as “big data”, the essential basic ingredient to power artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Used properly, these algorithms can then generate value, whether by optimizing certain processes (for example, getting certain drugs to places where they will be needed more quickly) or by simplifying others (sending patients less busy clinics, automate the exchange of information between various specialists, etc.).
In education too, technologies promise, among other things, to lighten the task of teachers or modernize their tools. Little known in Quebec, the Montreal company Paper has seen its value jump by a few billion over the past two years, as its online homework help service for high school students has gained popularity in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. It is easy to imagine that a tool like this could help Quebec schools that are sorely lacking in teaching staff.
In transportation, we hear more about manufacturers of electric cars than public transportation to solve the environmental issue. After all, the famous third link will be “green” thanks to electric cars, certain candidates for the election on October 3 have claimed.
There are companies in Western Canada that have developed huge turbines that literally filter the ambient air and capture just enough carbon dioxide to return the earth’s atmosphere to a gaseous composition one day. ideal and a pre-industrial level of greenhouse effect. As long as you dream…
All our problems are solved, then. It’s timely, because we will soon have to start debating the composition of the Canadian trios again on Twitter and share on Facebook our hot impressions aboutDouble occupation…
Too much is like not enough
It would be absurd to reject outright the benefits brought by certain new technologies, regardless of the field of activity affected. But if there’s one lesson to be learned from the past few years, it’s that it’s possible, and even easy, to be tricked and abused.
For the past fifteen years, the emergence of techno has led many to believe that, to be successful in business, it was necessary to “break up” an industry, smash its business models, even if it means breaking a few laws along the way.
We realize these days that the promise of better days has not been fully fulfilled by this revolution. Social networks were supposed to bring people together and ended up doing the opposite. Themselves are not doing very well. Facebook seems out of breath. Twitter is in full scuttlement. Snapchat just laid off a fifth of its payroll.
Uber brutally brought the taxi industry into the 21ste century in 2009, not without suffering. It too is paying the price: it lost US$24 billion last year alone.
Do we really want to transform health and education in this way?
In fact, the Legault government had anticipated this issue and had begun to pass laws to better regulate businesses. The application of these laws, progressive, has in some cases not yet started. It will therefore be up to the next government to take care of it.
And the government, like everyone else, is short of manpower. For example, the Commission d’accès à l’information will have to hire to ensure that companies will comply with these laws in their management of their customers’ digital data and the cyber threats to this data. No two schools in Quebec have the same technology supervision policy in the classroom, for lack of having all the necessary specialists. And so on.
Of the three parties that are in favor of more privateness in the public sectors, if we trust the polls, one could form this next government and the other, the official opposition. We can therefore assume that we will see this promise fulfilled sooner rather than later.
But if recent history tends to show one thing, insofar as the technological component will make up a first wave in this movement towards more private, it is that it will be necessary to accelerate the transformation of the public sector itself so that he is in a position to at least supervise this possible transition and avoid slippage as much as possible.