The current municipal council is divesting
themselves of publicly owned facilities. One year, they spent
millions of dollars to try and take over Union Gas, now they
want to privatize public facilities likes arenas and
pools.
This deal would be the beginning of
privatization of our common goods by privatizing the
Falconbridge and Barrydowne Arenas, Dow Pool and Adanac ski
hill.
We thought it was the mandate of the city to
provide these recreational services to the community. The issue
here is that the arenas, pools and the ski hill were fully paid
for by taxpayers and because they had been operating at a
deficit, the municipal council is dumping them to whoever wants
them.
It is a sad situation when the city council
is even contemplating this deal with Canlan Ice Sports out of
British Columbia.
What facilities are next on the chopping
block for next year?
The experience of privatizing public services
in other countries has been disastrous. What happens is that
the owners are there to make a profit thus, the prices go up
and your average citizens cannot afford them.
Only the people who can afford it would make
use of these facilities. Being that it becomes a private
enterprise, the citizens of the communities where the
facilities are located, have no say if the owners decide to
close the facilities.
This so- called partnership also means that
quite often, the municipalities take all the risk and the
private companies keep the profit for their shareholders.
Thus, our municipal council should put a stop
on this ludicrous idea of privatizing publicly owned
facilities.
Claude Berthiaume
Chelmsford, Ont.