September 25, 2006

Education

Mind your 3Ps and Qs: new course offered

School offers courses in public private partnership

PETER KENTER

Correspondent

The University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business plans to offer courses in Public Private Partnerships (PPP) — the first of their kind in Canada — by as early as 2007, says Tom Ross, director of Sauder’s Phelps Centre for the Study of Government and Business.

The school recently received a three-year, $500,000 grant from Infrastructure Canada to develop course material and conduct PPP research. “When the provincial Liberals took office here in 2001, they announced they were using the PPP model for major infrastructure projects,” says Ross.

“Suddenly I was receiving phone calls from the media asking us to explain the funding model — but there just weren’t a lot of people who knew.” British Columbia received something of a baptism by fire as the government initiated a slate of massive PPP construction projects including the Sea-to-Sky Highway improvement project and the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver Rapid Transit Project. “But we relied a lot on expertise from the U.K. and Australia early on,” says Ross. “There’s been a lot of learning along the way.”

Ross says that having Canadians trained in PPP processes could help to lead to efficiencies in future projects.

“In the early projects, administrative costs were probably higher than they might have been and the bidding process was also expensive. We shouldn’t judge the PPP model based on the first round of projects.”

The school’s academic efforts have begun with the introduction of PPP material into lectures and course content in undergraduate, MBA and civil engineering classes. The next likely step — a two-week intensive course with possible certification. The program would target current PPP practitioners in both government and industry.

“There’s room for learning on both sides,” says Ross. “The public sector decisionmakers will have to learn to give up some control and resist the urge to tinker with projects after they’ve started. The private sector needs to know what the government needs to see in a proposal.

“We hear that bidders in PPP projects are including anything they believe the government might be interested in, because they’re not always clear about the government’s objectives. “The private sector also has to realize that the government has to worry about transparency, accountability, and some case issues like equality of service — even if that’s not necessarily the most profitable way to proceed.”

Targeting existing PPP practitioners first is an approach favoured by the non-profit Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP).

The Council was one of the groups consulted in developing the emerging Sauder curriculum.

“Addressing the immediate needs of those working in PPP businesses and governments would provide a good foundation of knowledge of how PPP differs from conventional project development and how the integrated skills of engineering, finance and law come into play in a PPP project,” says Jane Peatch, executive director of the council. Ross says the next step could be the introduction of 20-hour/five-week PPP modules into the MBA program in the 2007-08 academic year. He notes that the course material won’t be a promotional vehicle for the advancement of PPP.

“As the saying goes, ‘To a man with a hammer, every problem seems like a nail.’ Our preliminary research shows that for some projects, PPPs may be very useful and in others, they’re less likely to be successful.” Over the longer term, Peatch says, the council would like to see PPP integrated into various university disciplines, including engineering and law, across the country. “These courses could benefit from an exposure to the concepts of PPP and, where appropriate, more detailed levels as it may relate to business cases and contract law, for example. Sauder is clearly taking a lead and we’ve been very pleased to see this initiative develop.”

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