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Originally Posted by saintjohnirish☘
Understood, but these are civic issues.
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Health and Education are under the purview of the Province.
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Originally Posted by saintjohnirish☘
And "cost effective"? Really? These are not businesses- the social wellbeing of South end Saint John (or north end and Lorne School) can't be reduced to mere numbers on a spreadsheet as they stand now, especially with all the work going into drawing people into the city
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Perhaps if Saint John were to have a population boom in the next ten years (either via immigrants or migrants from elsewhere in Canada) then these schools could remain open. With Centennial and Princess Elizabeth nearby it's difficult to make the argument that a school like Lorne, operating with 50 students when closed, should remain open. Obviously we don't have costs for these facilities publicly available but if we did i'd imagine the cost of operating a building that size for that few students would be staggering. Turning it into a community centre is the better option, IMO. It's not as if the building has been left empty and is rotting away.
What we do have available however are enrollment numbers which should be eye-opening to anyone who hasn't seen them:
Anglophone District South, Number of Schools:
2004: 77
2009: 74
2014: 74
Anglophone District South, Number of Students:
2004: 28,461
2009: 25,964
2014: 23,376
As a whole, provincial enrollment has dropped from 133K in 1996 to somewhere around 95K in 2016. That's a 40K drop in twenty years.
I understand that it's difficult seeing local community schools close but at some point they have to be looked at as numbers on spreadsheets when looking at the fiscal sustainability of the service as a whole. With 5K fewer students in a decade do you think the servicing costs should be the same? In the event that we keep schools open are you okay with your tax dollars keeping schools open in rural areas with under 50 students when they can be bused elsewhere nearby?
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Originally Posted by saintjohnirish☘
Where have these P3s worked? We are late to these trends. Looking around the work municipalities are taking back their public utilities and infrastructure as P3s are actually failures from Hamilton, Ontario to Paris, France. The trend now is remunicipaization.
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Confederation Bridge, Autoroute 30, Highway 407 to name a few, along with other government-led public-private partnership building projects. Arguably Cobequid Pass if you want to ignore the whole pay-toll thing that's been going on recently. As far as i'm concerned as long as vital public services aren't being turned over to private interests entirely (schools, health, etc.) then i'm all for private involvement in funding mechanisms for infrastructure projects or the like.