Canada’s public-private partnership (P3) players may have undertaken some 276 P3 projects across the country at last count worth $127 billion but they are still eager to improve their practices and seek ways to innovate as the sector matures.
That was the word at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Summit Series Americas event held earlier this month in Toronto.
RICS delegates attending an afternoon session on infrastructure heard such P3 notables as Mark Romoff, president and CEO of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP), and John McKendrick, an executive vice-president with Infrastructure Ontario (IO), discuss best practices and lessons learned in the Canadian P3 experience.
“The more you do of something the better you get at it,” said McKendrick. “So when you’re on your 40th DBFM (design, build, finance, maintain) you get pretty good at doing things and you have learned from your mistakes from the first few.”
Romoff told delegates governments around the world are realizing it’s imperative to shrink the worldwide infrastructure gap. Infrastructure investment drives job creation, economic growth, productivity and global competitiveness, he said.
“It has forced governments to think of more innovative and modern ways they are going to invest in it,” said Romoff.
That process, of striving for procurement innovation, continues at IO even as the agency has amassed a portfolio of 100 alternative financing and procurement projects (P3s), said McKendrick.
For example, he explained in an interview after the panel session, at one point IO came to realize it had been focusing almost solely on the construction side of projects and neglecting the maintenance component of a DBFM build, including life cycle.
And so IO hired Sean Wiley, formerly of SNC-Lavalin, to serve as its life cycle and asset management specialist.
“He was a great addition to the team and we were able to set him up and he set up his own team and now he is out there providing advice and looking at the concession stage of the DBFM,” said McKendrick.
“So he is involved in early stages, before we go into construction, and during construction, less so, but when we get to the end of construction and we turn it over, he takes over.”
IO also realized how important it is to ensure contractors launch a project with full documentation of site characteristics, to avoid surprises that could cause delays, said McKendrick.
IO now engages in comprehensive site analysis early in the procurement process. The principle of taking extra time early on in a project to fully understand it extends throughout the build and is invaluable, he said.
“Make sure you have good people on your side, good contractors, the design is good, your output is good, your specifications are good, so when the bidders, the general contractors, bid with you, they understand what they are going to get so they can price it properly,” he said.
Another practice IO has adopted is to consult with stakeholders such as contractor associations.
“What’s great, they will give us a heads-up, ‘you guys, please do not do this, we don’t have the capacity right now,’ or they will recommend we close the RFP a few months later, and we appreciate it, because it helps us to avoid too much work on the market at once and helps make the pricing more competitive,” said McKendrick.
Panellist Jameson Peterson, head of construction solutions with Voyage Control, also talked about collaboration at the beginning of a complex project, particularly when there are diverse activities in close proximity. His firm provided logistics consulting at a busy site in London, England where there was freight moving into the downtown exhibition centre near construction sites.
“Once you start talking about moving vehicles in and out of the construction sites and the exhibition centre, you can start to have an absolute nightmare of congestion,” he said.
The solution, he suggested, is consultation and smart cities strategies that can assess the needs of project owners and constructors.
The drive to improve practices and standards to ensure P3s run as efficiently as possible will be even more imperative as there is more adoption domestically and globally, Romoff said.
Smaller jurisdications such as Newfoundland, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and the Yukon are now entering the sector, as are Indigenous communities. The CCPPP is consulting with international bankers who are calling for P3 certification, and the organization is also active in working with other international agencies to ensure the bar is set high as new entities around the globe venture into P3s, Romoff said.
“Anything that can be done to up P3 capabilities is important,” he stated.
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