Municipal partnering and in-house are on the table
QUEEN’S PARK—While the roads may now be bare of snow and ice, debate continues at Queen’s Park over this year’s winter maintenance standards on Northern and rural roads in this province with Kenora-Rainy River NDP MPP Sarah Campbell requesting a committee to review Ontario’s winter road maintenance contracts with the aim of improving conditions before the snow flies again.
“This winter, the northwest, in particular, has experienced the worst winter in memory in terms of unsafe travelling on highways across our region,” Ms. Campbell said when addressed the House last Thursday, April 17. “I have heard concerns like tragic accidents, jackknifed tractor-trailers and the inability of emergency vehicles and crews to safely arrive on-scene. What’s worse is that these conditions weren’t only experienced at the time of or shortly after a winter storm, but these sub par conditions have been experienced consistently since the region’s first snowfall on November 18.”
While the winter may not have been extraordinary in terms of weather, the MPP continued, it has been in terms of “inadequate maintenance of most of our highways.” Despite repeated pleas from Northerners and their MPPs, this call for help has landed largely on deaf ears, she said, noting that the Minister of Transportation’s response was to fund “a few more plows” and mentioning the possibility of bringing snowplow services in-house.
Related Articles
- MTO boosts highway class for snowplow maintenance
- Island snowplow service losing one truck but MTO commits to same service
- This winter, the MTO has fined all of its 21 highway contractors
- Statement from the Minister of Transportation on Winter Highway Maintenance
Ms. Campbell said she has heard a wide range of issues dealing with roads contractors. “Again, not all contractors, but the vast majority of contractors in Northwestern Ontario aren’t fulfilling their contractual obligations,” Ms. Campbell said. “We have heard from people that contractors aren’t providing up-to-date information on road conditions and that, instead of being able to go to the MTO before starting their journey, people across Northwestern Ontario have actually had to contact and listen to the media.”
Ms. Campbell expressed concern with patrolling, enforcement and penalties for the contractors. In terms of patrolling, “we found that the patrol areas are far too large,” she said. “I’ve heard from contractor employees who say that they are expected to cover areas that are so large that it is impossible for them to assess each section of the highway more than one or two times a day.”
For enforcement, the MTO contract’s ‘outcome target indicators’ for the contractors “specifies that contractor logbooks, records, plans and actions that the contractor has taken will be the only indicators used to apply consequences of non-compliance. Underpinning the whole system, no matter what kind of fines and penalties the ministry has come up with for a contractor not complying, it’s based on the honour system; it’s based on the records that the contractor provides. I think that is something very serious that we have to look at.”
[pullquote]“In terms of the penalties themselves, clearly they aren’t strong enough to get action or to get some of the problem contractors to really pull up their socks and take the job seriously,” Ms. Campbell added.[/pullquote]
The MPP pointed to a study by the Manitoba Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation which reasoned that the privatization of Manitoba’s roads maintenance would lower costs at first, but would ultimately be equally or more expensive than public highway maintenance.
But what it all comes down to, she said to her fellow MPPs, is the safety of the people on these roads.
Algoma-Manitoulin MPP Michael Mantha also spoke, reading a letter he received from a constituent by the name of Rob Burns, a member of the Wawa volunteer fire department. The letter speaks of the tragic death of a 13-year-old boy on Highway 17 in November of 2011 south of Wawa, the result of a car accident.
“The deplorable conditions of Highway 17—the Trans-Canada Highway—in your riding is what caused this accident and took that young boy’s life,” Mr. Mantha read. Mr. Burns wrote that it had been discovered that this particular morning, the MTO contractor had decided against using salt on the road ‘because it was too cold,’ however it was actually only -12°C—not too cold for salt to work effectively at all. It was also noted that a salt spreader had made a pass along the highway after the accident but before the first responders were on scene.
“The fact that the MTO and our new service provider Transfield (an Australian company) failed to use salt to correct the state of the road boggles my mind,” the letter states. “Nothing was done to correct this situation and an innocent youth was killed two-and-a-half hours later. As drivers, we never have any control over what other drivers do, but you, the politicians, do.”
Nipissing Progressive Conservative MPP Vic Fideli said that while he supported Ms. Campbell’s motion, his own party has a motion in the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to direct the Auditor General to review the delivery of winter road maintenance.
MPP John Vanthof, an NDP member from New Liskeard, also spoke in favour of the motion, noting the “disconnect between the police, who actually close the roads, the contractors and the MTO.”
He also said he was looking forward to the audit. “Some people say, ‘the contractors bid too low. They can’t fulfill the contract. They can’t fulfill the standards,’ but that begs the question, because it should be the due diligence of the Ministry of Transportation to make sure that the contracts bid for—that they have adequate provisions and adequate funds and adequate equipment to actually complete the contract.”
When debate continued in the House of Commons on April 17, Northumberland-Quinte West Progressive Conservative MPP Rob Milligan, said he has heard time and again that under the new contracts introduced that service providers have to bid on, “the standards and the bare minimums were cut.”
“So this premier, Premier Wynne, is trying to paint herself as the transportation saviour for the province of Ontario,” he continued, “but neglecting rural Ontario once again—I have to make that point. What we’ve seen…is the fact that this government has made severe cuts to the services on our 401 corridor and this is unacceptable, especially coming from a premier who is trying to establish herself as the transportation premier.”
MTO Minister Glen Murray addressed the House, calling Mr. Milligan out on his party’s supposed ‘anti-rural’ views, stating that the Liberal government is spending $10 in rural Ontario for every dollar spent on infrastructure “when you were in government.”
Again referring to the former Progressive Conservative government, Minister Murray continued, saying, “They were part of 30 years of government that so massively underinvested in highways that we ended up with highway systems that are not safe enough—certainly not what they can be.”
Minister Murray agreed with Ms. Campbell that the winter road conditions this winter were “unacceptable.”
“They were particularly bad in the beginning of the winter,” he said. “Why was that? We’ve had an evolution of what we now call stage 3 contractors. Why do we have stage 3 contracts? Because since 1980, when we started privatizing things, particularly under the previous Conservative government, the ideological focus was to outsource it.”
He explained that it began with ‘managed contracts’—private sector-delivered services managed by the MTO which, he said, cost the private sector a huge amount of money.
“There was a statement made by former (Progressive Conservative) Premier Michael Harris where he said, ‘We have restructured government in a way that you can never reverse what we did.’ One of the examples that’s been used in Steve Paikin’s book, I believe, was that when you lay off 3,000 employees at MTO and you don’t leave a single truck, is it’s very hard for the public sector to get back into the snow removal business. I give the opposition party credit…They so eviscerated public sector winter maintenance that it’s very expensive when you don’t own a truck or a stick of furniture, to go back into the business again. They did that intentionally.”
He said that Ontario has the safest winter roads in North America when it comes to fatalities.
Minister Murray pointed to the Ontario Road Builders’ Association and its lobbying of the government to say “‘we don’t want managed contracts. Stop telling us and prescribing the system. Government, get out of the way,’” the minister said. “And they did. We’re at 25 percent less costs than we were in 1996. Why? Because politicians or officials at MTO said, ‘Let’s lower the budgets?’ No, Mr. Speaker. It’s because competitive bidding, for 20 years now, has been lower and lower and lower.”
The minister said that the tendering process is an open, competitive process where the lowest bidder that meets the standards wins and all 22 contractors went through this process. “If you want to put more money into it now, what do you say to the people who lost, who said, ‘I could do it, but I could do it for a higher price.’ It makes no sense. So MTO, actually, in the last round of contracts was so concerned about this we met with each contractor and said, ‘are you really serious? You can do that?’”
“I have 32 standards that they have to meet, that they’re held accountable to, or they get fines,” he continued. “Every one of these standards is quantifiable. It’s a percentage of bare pavement; it’s a particular time frame. There is nothing to quibble about. These are not qualitative standards that are up to judgment. You set the standard for snow removal. You set what the grade is, how bare it has to be, how fast, how quickly you have to get there, and the circuit times.”
“My ministry is holding those contractors to account,” he said emphatically. “Each of them that did not meet the standard of the contract that they signed, at the price they agreed to, is being fined. We have zero tolerance for unsafe roads. We have zero tolerance for contractors who sign a contract, win it over other bidders at a certain price, and don’t deliver. My concern is about opening up a whole bunch of pathways for people who are not meeting their contracts. The moment the contractors come to me or our ministry and say, ‘Minister, ministry, we can’t meet the contracts,’ we’ll open negotiations (for that particular contract).”
Minister Murray said he is not satisfied with the current system and has been investigating other options, such as bringing services in-house, but this would be difficult as the government now owns no snow removal equipment. The other option being pursued, and which will be discussed with Northern MPPs and the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities, is that the province fund the problem areas’ municipalities with extra trucks and vehicles to maintain the highways.
[pullquote]“Managed contracts we’re a little more skittish of because that means greater public sector expenditure with less control,” Minister Murray added. “It means that we have to be a bit of a nanny state, and we don’t get much more savings.”[/pullquote]
“I would say that in 80 percent of the province, this system is working very well,” he continued. “In 20 percent of the contracts, I had unending complaints, particularly in the member’s riding (Ms. Campbell’s) where it was completely unsatisfactory. In those areas where we had the greatest complaints, I am going to take the strongest measures…I’m going to be looking at in-house services and better standards enforcement for the contracts. Since we started doing the fines, even in the areas where we were having the problems, we’ve now seen much better improvement and the MTO staff reports 100 percent improvement in those areas.”
“I will work with the honourable member,” Minister Murray said. “If it’s through a committee, we’ll be open to that, but let’s get the results people deserve.”
