Private-Public Problems

Eglinton Crosstown Station rendering, copyright 2012 Metrolinx

It was recently decided that the upcoming Eglinton Crosstown LRT will be not only built by a private partner, but also operated by one. This has raised many concerns about how the "private" LRT will mesh with the publicly owned TTC.

Many experts and government officials will answer those questions (although perhaps not allay fears) in the coming years. I have my concerns about public-private partnerships (PPPs, or P3s) in regards to the operation of a public service such as transportation, because there are often competing goals between each camp. The "public" part will want to get the best "value" for their tax dollars. The private partner will have one goal: turning a profit.

I certainly don't condemn anyone (private sector or otherwise) for wishing to make money, and any government organization should be concerned about delivering its service at a reasonable cost, but it's dangerous to assume that "saving money" and "making money" are synonymous goals. There are several considerations that any government organization (like Metrolinx) must be aware of when penning a contract such as this one:

1) Public Transit rarely makes money. Indeed, it probably shouldn't; the loss at the fare box is usually more than made up when one factors in the various physical, economic, and environmental benefits that public transit provides. Still, this raises an important question about how much of a subsidy the private operator should receive. To give an idea of what's at stake, the TTC right now recoups about 2/3rd of its cost from the fare box. That missing 1/3rd is paid for by City of Toronto tax dollars. If fare is harmonized, the question is where exactly the private partner will make money. The answer is usually to squint the eyes at those "fat" union salaries, but I wonder if the gap between union and non-union salaries is enough to satisfy the private goal.

2) Public Transit cannot "go out of business". What contractual terms would be set between Metrolinx and the private entity? If we can agree that the reason Metrolinx wishes to have the line privately operated is to pass the "risk" of running a line to a different organization, then we must accept that the private organization is going to want a contract that reduces their risk. After all, if they can't see making a profit off the line, then they aren't going to want to run it. Period. Consider the fiasco with the London Tube as an example.

3) PPPs are complicated entities. I'm reminded of an article I once read about when the U.S. Military got a private organization to make fruitcake for their soldiers. Rather than the typical page you would expect the recipe to be, the recipe was instead over a dozen pages long. The government had to be extremely specific about what they were requesting, so that the private partner wouldn't cut corners, or deliver an "inferior" fruitcake to their men and women. Now, if it takes over a dozen pages for both parties to agree on how to make fruitcake, how complicated do you think a contract for operating a transit line must be?

And let's urge caution from the actual "public" viewpoint as well; when we pay for the privilege of a service (such as public transit), part of the deal is that we get to keep an eye on the books. Private companies, on the other hand, would retain complete privacy over their own finances and operations. It's one thing to criticize the TTC, as they have few corners to hide from public inquiry. It's another thing to cross one's fingers and hope that the public subsidy a private organization is getting is being put to good use.

Rethinking Poverty

"A homeless man sleeps on Queens avenue in downtown Toronto" (sic)

 Recently in the news, it was reported that a homeless man died owing more than $30,000 in fines, due to the Safe Streets Act, legislation from the Mike Harris days. The Safe Streets Act aims to "curb" panhandling by imposing fines on those caught doing so in an "aggressive manner", starting with a $500 fine, and then leading to either a fine of up to $1000, and/or a jail term of up the six months. Aggressive panhandlers can certainly make one uncomfortable within a public space; lord knows, in my short life I've seen panhandlers walking down a subway car asking for money, fights between two men for the "privilege" of opening a door to a Tim Hortons, and have even personally been accused of being racist for refusing to give change (although in fairness to Toronto, that happened in Halifax).

That said, hopefully we can agree that asking an individual to pay a $500 fine for panhandling is a ridiculous proposition; if they had $500 they could spend on such a fine, do you honestly think they would be panhandling  -- especially aggressively so -- in the first place?

In fact, pretty much all of our laws aimed to "stop" panhandling and homeless behaviour are absolute jokes. Fines and jail time are poor solutions because they do little to curb the behaviour. Designating places "illegal" to loiter/sleep in are just as ineffective, at best pushing a street person to a different part of the city, where it's someone else's problem to "deal" with. At worst, it's completely ineffective at "stopping" the behaviour.

The root causes of poverty (which lead to aggressive panhandling) are too complicated to be solved with temporary solutions (such as homeless shelters and food kitchens). Too often, society blames the individual for the state they're in, as if they're homeless because they want to be. As if they could just quit an addiction, cure their mental illness, or prevent the racism or prejudice that placed them on the street in the first place.

The biggest problem in my eyes with many of our solutions to dealing with poverty, is that we try and approach it from a traditional "market orientated" direction, believing that the problem with many people living in poverty is that they don't have enough incentive to lift themselves out of it. It's essentially the same argument that many would use against people they argue are abusing "welfare" programs: if we provide a base standard of living at little cost, then that will disincentivise a welfare recipient from going out into the market and getting a job or inventing iPhones and Snuggies or whatever.

Fair enough, it is certainly the case that some people abuse the system (and probably also the case that better "policing" of the system would cost more than simply accepting that abuse occurs). The problem, however, that the hardcore homeless face (that a normal welfare recipient would not) is that their behaviour can often be leagues more costly. Putting aside the $30k that the homeless man from the intro "owed", there are real costs to keeping homeless people "afloat".

We live in a society that dislikes the idea of giving someone something "for nothing", but also one that refuses to let a person die, even if the reason for poor health is a lack of the basic essentials in life (food, clothing, and shelter). Consider the following costs to the taxpayer incurred with someone who is "full-time" homeless that someone who is on welfare "full-time" will not:

1. Policing costs (e.g. jail time)
2. Medical costs (e.g emergency room visits)
3. "Temporary" costs (e.g. temporary shelter use)

Do the math, and the costs are potentially staggering. That's the genius behind a program like "Streets to Homes", in that it approaches the problem from the opposite direction, asking "what does someone who is homeless need to break out of the cycle of living on the street?" rather than "what's the minimum we, as a society, are willing to pay for to keep someone alive?" Indeed, for most participants, having a stable place to live reduces the three costs above dramatically, which themselves can help be paid for by "welfare" money they would be entitled to anyway.

Even if you disagree with the principle of giving people "housing with few strings attached", if you agree with the principle that "taxpayers shouldn't pay more for a service than they have to", a program like Streets to Homes is a gold mine of savings. But (and this is important!) Streets to Homes alone is not a "one-sized fits all" solution, and some people misunderstand it as such.

So we get garbage like this column with its author wondering about homeless sleeping near City Hall:

Here I thought the city was dishing out $14-million a year — as part of its Streets to Homes program — and had an army of 71 social workers dedicated strictly to getting the homeless and panhandlers off the street and into homes.

"We're paying good money to get rid of them! Why are they still around!?"

Because if there was a one-sized fits all approach to curing poverty, we wouldn't have the degree of homelessness we have in Canada, let alone people sleeping in Nathan Phillips Square!

For starters, the quality of affordable housing and "donated" market housing in the "Streets to Homes" program is rarely going to be top-quality; as one of the quotes in the above says, not all the units have air conditioning. We're not Vancouver; Toronto can get pretty damn humid at its worst.

Secondly, regardless of their have/have not status, many homeless individuals are just as attached to particular areas of the city as any "tax-paying" citizen is; just because you're homeless doesn't mean you don't have friends, support, or favorite places to be in the city. A place to live might be great, but maybe not ideal if it's halfway across the city from your usual haunt.

Thirdly, just because someone has nothing doesn't mean they'll accept anything. Some might honestly view (perhaps even correctly) that housing will inhibit their freedom. A handful of social programs, no matter how well-funded and how well-intentioned they are will not help everyone.

Rather than kicking individuals out of Nathan Phillips Square for "breaking" some bullshit law, we need to figure out why those individuals are choosing to sleep there in the first place. What attracts them to the area? Why here, but not somewhere else? What does a program like Streets to Homes lack that would "solve" this behaviour?

Kicking them out at 2am won't solve anyone's problem.

Review: The Suicide Shop

Animation Still from The Suicide Shop (Le Magasin des suicides), 2012

I was lucky enough to attend the premier of "The Suicide Shop" (Le Magasin des suicides) at the TIFF yesterday. My girlfriend had friends who offered to get us some free tickets to a show of our choice. Consulting Movie Man Extraordinaire Brad Fox, we narrowed the way too many movies we could see at TIFF down to a handful, based on a few criteria, the most important of which was the likelihood that we wouldn't be able see the movie in theatres in the future. The Suicide Shop, a french animated dark comedy/musical, won. 

We were both surprised that we were handed glasses as we went into the theatre; neither of us were under the impression that this was going to be a 3-D film. Regardless, we ended up with pretty good seats (thanks, waiting in line an hour before the show!) and while I was bothered by how dirty the 3-D glasses were, I tried not to let my distaste for 3-D sour my opinion of the movie. The director, Patrice Leconte, was on hand for the movie, and the crowd was pretty excited.

To be as spoiler-free as possible, The Suicide Shop is a movie about a family (the Tuvaches) that runs a shop in a nondescript urban city (likely a rough stand-in  for Paris). Their trade is in giving you the right tool you need to commit suicide. As the movie explains, the world sucks, and what with all the economic and environmental collapse (and general misery), more people than ever are thinking about ending their lives. The Tuvache family is kind of like an entrepreneurial take on the Adams Family, making their products attractive to their clientelle, despite the grim nature of what they're selling (the patriarch of the family Monsieur Tuvache, proudly declares that their razor blades are sharpened in store, and they have rusty ones if you want to increase your odds of getting tetanus).

As per any good movie, the birth of their third child, a perpetually happy twerp named Alan, throws things into disarray. Despite the enthusiasm they project to their customers, their business is a dark one, and Alan's cheerful personality (if he's not laughing, he's whistling) makes it hard to sell ceremonial Japanese swords, deadly insects, and pre-noosed rope to their customers.

The Suicide Shop manages to straddle the uncomfortable line that innately comes when talking about suicide. The movie doesn't attempt to pass judgement on the shop's "customers". People from all walks of life are seen shopping for the method of death that's "right for them"; we aren't often told the stories about why they want to commit suicide. And perhaps this is for the best; the Tuvaches aren't trying to put the gun to your head, they're merely selling you the bullets. Entrepreneurs of death, in their own strange way. Once you have the means, the rest is your decision. But, in case their product fails, they offer a money back guarantee.

The animation itself is quite good, presenting the Tuvaches and their customers in thick outlines and various greys that stiffly move through the frames, whereas the jubilant son, Alan, bounces with colour and energy. There is a lot of detail packed into most of the backgrounds, making it a pleasure to watch. I wasn't huge on the 3-D (like many movies, it's hardly noticeable) but it's rarely a distraction, and the director even made the decision to make the movie brighter overall to help combat the unpleasant dimming effect from the glasses. Given the "flat" style of the animation, the 3-D works, in its own fashion. If possible, I think I would still recommend viewing it in 2-D however.

This is a musical, where characters can spontaneously break out in song, but don't expect any toe-tapping numbers here. The songs are generally competent, but they're not overall exciting. The lone exception is a scene where Monsieur Tuvache visits a psychiatrist, who proceeds to burst into energetic motions as he sings about his job. There are some interesting visuals that accompany some of the music, but the the musical numbers are quite forgettable.

The biggest flaw of this movie is its uneven plot. The relationships between the characters remind me in a lot of ways of The Simpsons, particularly the strained relationship between Monsieur Tuvache and his son Alan. The movie is supposed to be of Alan's desire to bring some cheer and happiness into the lives of his family, but that's not particularly an interesting narrative thread. The elder Tuvache meanwhile, is a man who is both charming and good at selling death to customers, but is troubled by his line of work (after all, if he's successful, he never sees his customers again). The movie spends too little time exploring Monsieur's contradictions, and instead includes a few farcical scenes where he and his son clash. The most puzzling is one where the elder Tuvache convinces young Alan to take up smoking, with head-scratching reasoning and no pay-off. Like the relationship between Homer and Bart, it's a perfectly acceptable idea in the film that a father might want to seriously harm his son out of anger, as long as no one is seriously hurt in the end.

The conclusion of the film is equally nonsensical, but certainly The Suicide Shop is not the first film to have its characters do a 180 when the plucky youth shows the adults the error of their ways.

Overall, The Suicide Shop is a fun little movie (it clocks in at a mere 79 minutes), but the whimsical animation is hampered by a fairly mediocre script. But it's still worth seeing if you like dark comedies, or quirky animated films. As a parental note, this movie probably isn't for kids. There is a moderate amount of swearing, and some brief nudity, although the violence is generally tasteful. This (I'm told) is pretty typical of European films, but still. I give this film a non-scientific 3/5.