We urgently need to reduce the size and cost of government.
A good way to do this would be to require public sector unions to compete with private sector unions, not-for-profits and businesses to provide and deliver government services. This process would improve the quality of public services through better hours, more products delivered and more responsive service.
The role of government would be to supervise the competitive process and set and enforce standards. Government oversight needs to be improved, whether services are provided publicly or privately. E-health is just one example of a service provided publicly that was not supervised properly.
If we’re going to pull Ontario out of the current jobs and spending crisis, we need to think in innovative new ways. Creating competition in government service delivery can help us break away from hidebound, dated approaches to serving the public. It will also make government more efficient, freeing up savings for the services we all value – such as health care and education.
Key benefits of the Progressive Conservative plan would include:
- Cost savings: Competition encourages would-be service providers to keep costs to a minimum or lose the contract to a more efficient competitor.
- Quality improvements: A competitive process encourages bidders to offer the best possible service quality to win out over their rivals.
- Improved risk management: Governments are better able to control costs by building cost-containment provisions into contracts.
- Innovation: The need for lower-cost, higher-quality services under competition encourages providers to create new, cutting-edge solutions to help win and retain government contracts.
Competition in public service delivery has been tried, and found to work in many other jurisdictions. Florida used competitive sourcing and other alternative methods more than 130 times between 1999 and 2007, saving more than $500 million. The City of Phoenix, Arizona saved more than $25 million over 10 years by developing a competitive bidding process. Indianapolis saw average cost savings of 25 per cent through the life of a managed competition program in the 1990s. Virginia identified 205 commercial activities being performed by 37,000 state employees that could be provided through competitive outsourcing. The program is estimated to be saving at least $40 million a year.
Opening public services to competition means we can introduce more of the efficiency of the free market into the system. I want to see businesses, large and small, across Ontario involved in bidding for government contracts.
One of my priorities would be to ensure that small businesses have as much access as possible to bidding. This was a key provision of the Small Business Bill of Rights that I introduced in the legislature for debate last year. One of the points I wrote into my bill was, “The right to operate on a level playing field with larger businesses in seeking government contracts or participating in government boards, consultations or advisory agencies.”
We need to open up the operations of government to the free market, and ensure that every business has a fair and equal chance to compete. This will be better for businesses, taxpayers and the people using public services.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Julia Munro MPP
Quelle/Source: The Scope, 01.02.2012
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