It's sad what is happening to Toronto with the massive shift toward privatization of essential public services and at the same time the corporation of almost all public space in the city. I especially feel for friends and family who live there and are going to have to watch the city slowly fall apart as the interest in making a profit in return for as little service as possibly gradually causes the city to erode.
At the same time, it's good that this is happening because in 10 years when Toronto has completely disintegrated, is utterly unliveable, and has driven off all its working people (who can't afford to survive there anymore) we will be able to look back and say: this is a text book example of how the delusion that the private sector is competent to run things is completely false.
But then again, there's really no winning either way. It's true that government run institutions tend to become highly inefficient bureaucratic messes if left long enough, and also they are always the victims of governmental budget cuts if they are in any sector other than the military yet…
If public run institutions (by which I mean crown corporations and government run institutions) are bad, private ones (by which I mean corporation entities) are worse. The is absolutely no motivation for any corporation to provide service to places where it is not profitable for them to do so. Their mandate (no matter what lies they tell in business school) is always to get maximum profit from minimum investment. Things like public parks, schools, garbage collection, public libraries, etc just can't be run like that because the end result will always be unequal access to things that should be (if we live in a democracy where every vote is an equal one) distributed equally.
Another thing public institutions have over private ones is that at least, on some level, they are accountable to the people they serve as customers. The shareholders of a public institution are all the people who pay taxes and they can (ideally..and I know it is a rarely exercised ideal), technically speaking, make the institution accountable for its actions either by petitioning the government or by election a new government that better serves their interests.
With a private corporation, however, the shareholders are often not the same people as they customers and thus the accountability for what the corporation does is in the hands not of the people who are affected by what it does to make money but instead by the money it makes. Shareholders, though, might not necessarily care that their corporation they own shares in employs people in sweatshops or poisons children with toxic plastic or puts chemicals in its milk or anything, as long as the money keeps coming in.
