September 11, 2005
Remarks to the Project Management Institute World Congress
by David Caplan, Minister of Public Infrastructure Renewal
Check Against Delivery.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me to join you this afternoon and for giving me this opportunity to welcome you to Ontario.
Your congress registration material promises that here in Toronto you will find a world within a city. And you will.
I hope you have a chance to enjoy the cultural richness and diversity that this city offers and I am sure your hosts will make you feel at home.
I know our guests from the United States cannot attend any event on September 11th without being reminded of the terrible events of this day. Please allow me to express my sympathy on this anniversary of your national tragedy.
And I know my fellow Canadians share your distress and sorrow about awful devastation of Hurricane Katrina. We wish you well, and hope for a speedy recovery.
When I was invited to speak at the opening of this Congress, I started to do a little research on the subject of project management.
And I came across a remark attributed to Pope Leo the 10th, in which he talks about Leonardo Da Vinci. It seems appropriate to your profession.
The Pope was complaining about the slow pace of his projects.
“Leonardo will never finish anything,” Pope Leo said. “He thinks of the end before he has even begun.”
Consider that for a moment: “He thinks of the end before he begins.”
Maybe you should choose Leonardo Da Vinci as the patron of your association…
Because refusing to begin until you think about the ending is perhaps the most important characteristic of your discipline.
This sounds like common sense and it is.
But I’m sure you can all think of projects — including government projects — that got started without a clear end in sight.
One of the reasons we need your expertise in government is because common sense is what you bring to your work…
And in the past, governments have not been known for common-sense management of large projects.
We have always had good intentions. But often the project has been late or over-budget or not well suited to either the need or the resources available. Sometimes all three.
That is no reflection on your profession, or the skill of project managers in the public service.
Certainly the members of this organization who work for the government I represent are dedicated and conscientious.
The trouble lies with the deficiencies of the political process.
For example, in a country that shall remain nameless, but which borders Canada on the south. There is a state with a population about one-quarter the size of Toronto that has just received federal funding to build a bridge bigger than the Golden Gate Bridge to connect a town of 14 hundred people to an uninhabited island.
You may hear a little envy in my voice when I say that. I would be delighted to get that kind of funding from the federal government.
But I like to think we could find a better use for the money.
I don’t mean to point the finger at anyone. Certainly we have our share of bridges or subways to nowhere. There are lots of white elephants here too.
The point I am making is that we can’t afford them any more. And neither can you.
There are two things we are doing in Ontario to eliminate the white elephant.
One is to hire competent people with professional expertise to manage our projects.
That is why you will find many members of this organization working for the provincial government.
In fact, your members are very active in our Project Management Excellence initiative, which shares expertise and best practices across the public service with good results.
The second thing we can do is create mechanisms that demand common sense and proper management in everything we do, and especially in my area of responsibility, public infrastructure.
I’m going to spend the balance of my time with you describing some of those mechanisms. I hope we will have an opportunity later to discuss some of these concepts, because I think your insights will be very valuable.
I represent a new government. We were elected less than two years ago, in October, 2003.
We came to office with the conviction that we needed to do government differently that we needed to be agents of change in the way the public affairs of Ontario are managed.
One of the most important of those changes is a new way of looking at public spending and especially public investments in infrastructure projects.
We consider these questions in the context of broader social issues and we use our infrastructure investments as ways of achieving specific social objectives.
Let me give you one quick example.
Urban sprawl has become a major issue in the Greater Toronto region.
This is the fastest-growing region in Canada, and one of the fastest-growing areas in North America.
Within a quarter of a century we expect close to four million more people will live in Ontario, and about 85 per cent of them will settle within 100 miles of this room.
We don’t want to accommodate that growth by increasing urban sprawl.
Urban sprawl means people have to drive almost everywhere they want to go.
It causes gridlock and traffic congestion that damage our health and harm our economy and with gasoline in Ontario at about $4 a gallon, it no longer sounds like a good idea.
That’s the challenge: accommodate rapid growth without suffering the damaging effects of urban sprawl.
The solution we are implementing involves legislation that limits the growth of low-density suburbs on the fringes of urban areas.
But it also uses our investments in public infrastructure — in roads, hospitals, schools, water supply, cultural and recreational facilities — to direct future growth to communities where increased population density will support amenities like effective public transit.
The effect is to reduce both the impact of sprawl, and the cost of providing public infrastructure.
When the population is more concentrated, our hospitals and schools can serve more people more efficiently.
When you reduce congestion by improving public transit, you also reduce the need for more and bigger highways
and you make it more difficult to justify a highway to nowhere.
Those are the results we want. How do we achieve them?
Mainly, by better planning.
When you consider public infrastructure projects to be a means to address social issues rather than as ends in themselves you have to plan much more carefully, and over a much longer time period.
You have to think of the end before you even begin.
There was a time when the government of Ontario like most governments made decisions about capital projects year-by-year and piece-by-piece.
The Ministry of Transportation built highways; the Ministry of Health funded hospitals; the Ministry of Education funded schools and much of the time they didn’t talk to each other.
We don’t do that any more and probably your government doesn’t do it either.
If we hope to achieve the social objectives the voters have set for us — better healthcare, better schools, clean water, less congestion, a cleaner environment — we have to coordinate our investments across the whole government.
And we have to plan our investments, not year-by-year, but far into the future.
That’s what we’re doing now.
A few months ago my ministry published a document called ReNew Ontario that provides a strategic framework for infrastructure investments for the next five years.
It is the blueprint we will follow into the future.
Our five-year investment plan is one of the mechanisms we are using to control the impulse to build white elephants.
A second is a dramatic transformation of the process we use to plan, finance, procure, and manage public infrastructure.
We call this reformation the Framework, but the formal title is Building a Better Tomorrow.
Incidentally, all of these documents are posted on my ministry’s website if you want more detailed information.
The Framework is a set of policies and procedures that will govern every infrastructure project in which there is a substantial investment by the province.
The effect is to transform an ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants way of doing business into a standardized process that is predictable, rational, coherent and fair.
Instead of evaluating every suggested development in isolation, we now have a tool that allows us to consider these proposals in comparison with other projects and in the context of the government’s broader social objectives to create a society that is healthier better educated and more prosperous.
One important element of the Framework is a method of supervising private investment in public infrastructure.
Like many other jurisdictions, Ontario needs to invest more in infrastructure than the government can afford.
The obvious answer is to encourage investments from pension funds and other private capital pools.
But these private investments must be appropriate to the public assets they create.
And they have to be structured in a way that serves the public interest as well as the requirements of the private sector.
Within my ministry we have created an Infrastructure Financing and Procurement division that helps public agencies and organizations in the broader public sector — universities and hospital boards, for example — take advantage of private financing, while still maintaining the proper levels of public ownership and control.
In fact we are in the process now of establishing an agency that will serve as a centre of excellence in structuring financing arrangements for the broader public sector.
Some classes of assets — hospitals and water systems, for example — must be publicly owned. All classes of public assets must have appropriate public control.
So far as private financing for public infrastructure is concerned, Ontario is open for business. But we aren’t going to give away the store.
These are ambitious initiatives. We know that.
When they are completed, we will have transformed public infrastructure in this province in the way it is builtthe way it is plannedthe way it is financedand the way it is managed.
That won’t happen quickly. But the longest journey begins with a single step. And we have begun that journey.
The steps we are taking now not just in creating and implementing projects, but in reforming the way we manage the process will create a renaissance for Ontario. Just as Leonardo Da Vinci helped create an artistic and cultural renaissance in Italy 500 years ago.
I am proud to be able to play a part in that process.
But it is obvious that none of our grand ambitions will be realized if we neglect the details.
It is not enough to create great projects. They have to be carried through to completion by men and women who are dedicated, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable.
That is a good description of the men and women here today. And I welcome you as partners in this endeavour and in similar initiatives in your home jurisdiction.
Thank you for your attention this afternoon.
