Convention centre choices—with consequences
CBC Radio’s Mainstreet host, Stephanie Domet, had an interesting conversation last week with federal Liberal MP Scott Brison and former provincial PC leadership candidate Bill Black.
The topic: taming Nova Scotia’s debt woes.
While Black in particular had many thoughtful things to say, I was intrigued by his answer to one question. Does it really make sense for a debt-saddled province to commit $163.5 million over 25 years to construct a new convention centre?
Black had clearly examined the numbers behind convention centre proponents’ better-than-sliced-bread claims and pronounced them “inflated.” Despite that, he concluded we would probably look back in 20 years and say building the centre was money well spent.
That’s curious. Forget what the research says because we know it lies, but don’t worry. It’ll work out. Be happy.
But could not that $163.5 million be invested as well—if not better—in improving support for the 4,000, often under-achieving black students in our school system?
More education. Higher skills. Better paying jobs. More provincial taxes…
Education Minister Marilyn More last week “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with all 68 recommendations in a 2009 report on helping African Nova Scotia students. But she didn’t put a penny toward that goal.
Instead the government anted up $163.5 million for a convention centre, most of whose ongoing jobs will likely be part-time and low-paying.
Investing in a convention centre is a choice—with consequences.
Unsurprisingly, many who want governments to sink public money into a convention centre also advocate spending and tax cuts designed to limit even more public opportunities to invest in better-educated, more-qualified citizens.
Take the Chamber of Commerce. After last week’s convention announcement, President Valerie Payn gushed “she could feel the positive vibes already” from the decision to pour public money into a convention bunker we won’t own.
Three months earlier she was bleating the provincial budget didn’t reduce the small business tax rate as much as the Chamber wanted and increased the hated HST by two per cent. “Our members have told us they wanted the province to look for spending cuts,” she said.
Oh yes, and a convention centre.
Beware those who conflate private with public interest.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The convention centre gamble that isn’t
So Darrell Dexter’s government has decided to gamble $163.5 million of our tax dollars over the next 25 years on a spiffy new, super-sized, half-billion-dollar downtown-convention-centre-bunker-hotel-and-office-tower complex we may or may not be able to fill five years from now.
That reckoning—conveniently and perhaps not coincidentally—will coincide nicely with when the bills actually begin to come due and—even more conveniently—after the next provincial election.
During last week’s funding announcement in front of a fawning group of convention centre boosters and self-interested lobbyists, the premier emphasized the development’s big-league-making proportions—“one of the largest building projects to take place in our city’s history”—and, of course, the centre’s “potential” to generate “far-reaching… spin offs” along with its “potential to create tremendous economic opportunities for the entire province.”
Far too much about this new convention centre is based on its hope-and-prayer “potential,” its smoke-and-mirror benefits and its too many un-questioned assumptions.
For starters, of course, there is the question of whether it can succeed. There has been an ongoing, North America-wide decline in the number of larger conventions this centre is designed to attract at a time when many other cities are already building similar facilities to compete for that shrinking market.
Potential benefits? Jobs? Twelve thousand, says Estabrooks; 27,000 over 10 years boasts Trade Centre Ltd. B.S., counters anyone who can count. Even the consultants the Trade Centre hired to come up with positive numbers don’t claim that.
There is also the question of whether this is really just another suspect public-private partnership in which taxpayers get fleeced while developers count profits? Remember P-3 schools? The $50-plus million the auditor general says we’re currently spending unnecessarily on them?
Infrastructure Minister Bill Estabrooks insists this isn’t a dreaded P-3 project. But taxpayers are putting up the cash to build it. And the developer will own it. Sounds like P-3 to me.
And so it goes.
But the larger question of whether the convention centre makes sense isn’t really the government’s worry. It’s more concerned about hard hats on the construction site come election day and bills that don’t have to be paid until after…
Perhaps not such a gamble after all.
For more on the Convention Centre, check out Tim Bousquet's excellent online series in The Coast: "Why the Convention Centre Sucks," Parts 1, 2, 3 and...
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Doing the right thing the wrong way
It has been a crazy rollercoaster of a pin-balling, ping-ponged week for those of us who get our knickers knotted about seemingly esoteric matters like public access to public information and government accountability.
But all’s well that ends well… sort of.
Let’s start with NDP MLA Howard Epstein’s “inadvertent” leak of confidential caucus information indicating municipal and provincial taxpayers would each be asked to pony up $57 million for a new downtown convention centre.
Rather than discussing the merits of spending that much public money on this particular project, the discussion quickly derailed over arguments about whether the NDP caucus should punish Epstein for what Infrastructure Renewal Minister Bill Estabrooks called his “unacceptable” behaviour.
Unacceptable? We’re not supposed to know—before any decision gets made—how much of our money is to be in play?
Thankfully, the caucus accepted Epstein’s “apology.”
Better, the next day Premier Darrell Dexter announced his government will now release the actual bid details this week so everyone can weigh in before any decision is made.
Dexter insisted that decision had nothing to do with Howard “being Howard” and forcing his hand.
He may be right. To give the government its due, Estabrooks this spring did force the release of other studies about the viability of the project and has generally been more transparent than his predecessors.
But by waiting too long to do the right thing, Dexter’s government lost whatever credit it might have otherwise earned for the decision.
The same is true of its bungled handling this week of what items should be included in online postings of MLAs’ expenses. Initially, Speaker Charlie Parker claimed that, on the basis of legal advice about privacy concerns, MLA expense postings would not include information about who was selling whatever goods or services MLAs were buying.
Huh? If an MLA is buying from his brother-in-law, we’re not supposed to know?
Again, better brains prevailed and, by the end of the week the Speaker was in full back pedal.
But why was it an issue at all?
For a party so attuned to the public mood in opposition, this government has developed a remarkably tin ear.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.