Does the State Sells Itself?

I am not an economist. I have no diploma on the wall entitling me to speak about sovereign funds and transfer payments.

What I do have is a memory — and the scars from debates I have already been through, in another country, in another language, with the same outcome.

In the early nineties I was still living in Switzerland, and I remember the railway privatisation debate the way you remember a bad family dinner: loud at the start, uncomfortably quiet by the end. The arguments sounded modern, the promises gleamed. Efficiency. Competition. Private innovation in service of the citizen. Switzerland listened, turned the argument in its hand like a stone — and then set it quietly back down. Not with fanfare, but with the calm resolve of a country that understands its infrastructure as collective memory, not as a line item on a balance sheet.

Then I moved to Canada. And now I sit here, with a coffee that is too strong, reading about the Canada Strong Fund. And inspired by listening to a report by The Rational National.

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks about this fund with a brightness I recognise. He cites Norway. He says sovereign fund and means by it, I think, something noble — generational thinking, resource stewardship, long-term capital in service of the nation. That sounds good. That even sounds right. Only the Norwegian fund is not a dealmaker. It does not acquire minority stakes, it does not sit at a table with private partners dividing up risks and returns. It is a sovereign owner, belonging to Norway entirely, without a comma of negotiation. When Carney uses the same term for a model that explicitly relies on public-private partnerships, that is not an oversight. That is vocabulary as costume.

The Auditor of Ontario said in numbers in 2014 what I could only put into gut feeling: 74 P3 projects, eight billion dollars in extra costs. Eight billion that landed somewhere in private balance sheets, while the bridges and clinics remained exposed to the weather all the same. That is not a political argument — that is a receipt. And when the same logic is now to be applied to airports, while at the same time 1.2 billion dollars for mental health services is being allowed to lapse because temporary agreements are not being renewed, then the direction of travel is fairly clear. The returns go private. The risks stay with us.

I am not alone in this hesitation — which reassures me and unsettles me in equal measure. Unions are saying it. Provincial auditors have documented it. Health associations are running the numbers right now. When so many different voices point to the same pattern, that is not coincidence and not complaining — that is social memory, making itself heard.

The old hippie in me would say: what belongs to the people should stay with the people. But the Swiss in me prefers to put it this way: sometimes the wisest decision is the one made quietly and without fanfare — by picking up a stone, turning it briefly in your hand, and then simply setting it back down.