Linda McQuaig

If the Ontario Place spa deal is so good, why is Doug Ford so secretive?

Therme Canada

Eliminating the secrecy would force governments to develop a backbone in dealing with private companies.

One of the few things we know about the private luxury spa to be built at Ontario Place is that the lease will run for 95 years. (We’ll all be dead by the time it expires.)

And we only know about the lease’s longevity because it was leaked to the media.

Almost everything else about this deal remains unknown, since the Ford government refuses to release the contract — even though it involves 22 acres of precious public waterfront and hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds.

One of the basic principles of democratic governance is that, as taxpaying citizens, we get to know how our money is spent.

And that principle is rigorously upheld when it involves government spending on social welfare payments or on contracts with public sector workers. Such spending is carefully scrutinized with every penny accounted for.

But when government spending involves private businesses, all that openness and accountability disappears. Instead, a veil of secrecy is draped over the deals, preventing our prying eyes from knowing what’s going on with our money.

This secrecy allows governments to get away with signing bad or corrupt deals — just as secrecy allowed the Ford government to favour certain developers in the Greenbelt, as the auditor general has found.

Catering to powerful business interests is clearly a problem with Doug Ford, who has demonstrated a steely focus on pushing down public sector wages while allowing public money to spill out freely to businesses — such as private nursing agencies or corporate chains operating long-term care homes.
One wonders if Ford is even capable of driving a hard bargain with big private-sector players.
What little we know about the spa deal, for instance, isn’t encouraging. The government says it will pay the costs — an estimated $600 million — of preparing the land for the spa and creating an enormous underground parking garage to service the spa.
What do we get in return? Is the spa owner even required to pay rent during all those decades?; is the owner restricted from operating any additional businesses there (a casino, perhaps?); is there any restraint on the size of the spa’s carbon footprint (as it heats its massive building to tropical temperatures through 95 Canadian winters, while the world burns)?
The secrecy of government contracts is defended as necessary to protect the proprietary interests of private companies, although it’s not clear why these business interests should override our democratic right to know how our money is spent.
Sandford Borins, professor emeritus of public management at the University of Toronto, argues that the disbursement of public funds should never be treated as confidential business information.

If companies don’t like that, they could refuse to do business with government. Of course, they wouldn’t refuse; they love doing business with government because those contracts are secure, lucrative and payment is assured.

Eliminating the secrecy would force governments to develop a backbone in dealing with private companies.

For instance, in 1999, Mike Harris was re-elected Ontario premier weeks after announcing he was going to privatize Highway 407. It was only years later that the 407 contract was made public — by a subsequent government, in response to a freedom-of-information request.

Only then did the public learn that the contract placed no limit on how high the private company could raise the tolls (which explains why 407 tolls are among the world’s highest).

Imagine if the 407 contract had been made public in 1999 and Mike Harris had to face voters who knew he’d provided them no protection against price-gouging by a company that would control a major provincial highway for the next nine decades.

Instead, due to the ridiculous secrecy surrounding government deals with business, Harris was well out of town by the time Ontarians found out how vulnerable they were, leaving us able to do little more than ponder whether the premier had signed such a terrible deal out of corruption or just stupidity.

Here we go again.

Originally published in the Toronto Star August 10, 2023.