| A BOOK BY CHANDRAN MYLVAGANAM AND SANDFORD BORINS |
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MANAGING BOOKS: IDEAS
By HARVEY SCHACHTER
This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, Wednesday,
July 6, 2005, Page C2. Reprinted with permission.
. . . Chandran Mylvaganam and Sanford Borins look at how business and government combined to build the Greater Toronto Area's electronic toll highway in If You Build it... (University of Toronto Press, 164 pages, $19.95).
The book offers lessons in how to make public partnerships work but is mostly a thorough dissection of this specific venture, including a fact-based criticism of the Harris government's handling of the highway's privatization. Its most compelling section, given the federal Liberal sponsorship scandal, is how the Ontario NDP government—from whom the Harris Tories inherited the project—insulated itself from the evaluation of the competing bids by consortiums seeking to build the highway, explicitly prohibiting lobbying in the request-for-proposal process and leaving the decision to civil servants.