Homeless in Vancouver: Public-private partnerships have deep roots in B.C.

At the Vancouver General Hospital, even the trees get some sort of checkup.

Along the southeast corner of 10th Avenue and Oak street, which also happens to be the southeast corner of the grounds of the VGH, several of the trees have a green plastic disk nailed into their trunks. Each disk is stamped with a four digit number and the name of a company: Diamond Head Consulting.

Diamond Head specializes in looking after trees. Its website explains that the company has been in business for 13 years and that many of the employees started their careers working in the alpine ecosystems around the Diamond Head area of Garibaldi Provincial Park.

Is this perhaps a polite way of saying that Diamond Head Consulting was founded by former employees of the B.C. government who were done out of jobs when, 13 years ago, the B.C. Liberals under Gordon Campbell steamed ahead with the privatization of the management of B.C. parks—I wonder?

Business as usual

Privatization of the B.C. park system began modestly enough under the B.C. Socreds, with a handful of parks in 1983, but it accelerated with the election of the B.C. Liberals in 2001.

According to a BC Business article, by 2013, 251 of B.C.’s 830 parks were operated by private-sector park facility operators, or PFOs.

One such PFO, RLC Park Services, specifically traces its origin to the privatization of park operations under Premier Bill Vander Zalm. From its start in 1989, bidding for the contract to operate Macdonald Provincial Park, RLC has grown to operate some 39 parks on Vancouver Island.

I can only conjecture that Diamond Head Consulting came about as a result of park privatization (my email to the company has thus far gone unanswered) but either way it’s one of those companies—operations that look and act like public services in private-sector clothes.

These companies—Diamond Head, Pole-Tec Services, Precision Pole Inspections, and Allteck, come to mind—are so frequently employed by provincial and municipal governments that they may as well be government departments.

For its part, Diamond Head offers consulting services on every aspect of what it refers to as arborculture and urban forestry. Its steady clients include B.C. Hydro and its name turns up in many reports issued by Metro Vancouver municipalities on such matters as invasive plant species and urban tree canopies.

Some of what I’m seeing might be related to the privatization of government support services in the last 20-some years but it’s hard to tell.

I have to remember that in British Columbia, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have long been the norm rather than the exception.

After all, B.C. was a company town long before it was a province. Back in the 1820s it was the Columbia Department of the Hudson’s Bay Company. And as a province, beginning in 1871, B.C. has always operated as a kind of public-private partnership, with the emphasis on private.

So it’s probably more accurate to say that in British Columbia, companies that look like government services and public agencies that act like private corporations are really just business as usual.