jamescanuck2001

mercer is going to have a field day if harper declines. and harper's poll numbers will plummet. given how secretive and untransparent harper has been as a prime minister, will certainly be apropos if the issue of this election becomes his refusal to debate the issues, and instead follow a carefully scripted and choreographed campaign

any entity that provides a public service is paid by the government responsible for the service (federal/provincial/territorial/municipal). the entity could be private company, a non-profit group, an individual, a public servant. the government needs to answer the question of who delivers and gets paid for the service, but firstly whether the service is needed at all. when harris was ontario premier, he decided the private sector should deliver a higher proportion of public services, and slashed the public service. in the area of infrastructure, the result has been very poor. instead of administering (1) public service employees as per the collective bargaining agreement, and (2) the building contractor as per the construction tender, it is now necessary to administer (1) the public service employees who oversee a consulting engineering firm providing construction inspection services, (2) the agreement with the consulting engineering firm, and (3) the construction tender. basically, outsourcing of inspection services by harris added another layer of administration, to oversee and administer the private firms now doing the work of the laid off public employees. there is recent data that shows that the cost of providing the construction inspection service by public service employees is roughly 60% the cost of hiring a consulting engineering firm to provide the service. you can expect similar data for most of the harris changes. Some of the harris changes resulted in cost savings/delivery efficiency, but the majority of his changes increased the cost of delivering the service. interestingly, it is known throughout government that the outsourcing of public services to the private sector is often more costly than directly delivering the service by public servants, but despite this knowledge the change will not happen, as it is politically unpalatable to increase the size of the civil service. this is taking the discussion off on a slant, but lets see where it goes