The Shopping Mall Question

Would Canadians be best served by having our shopping malls owned and operated by governments for the benefit of all?

There may have been a time when it was acceptable for the private sector to construct and operate retail shopping malls, but those days have passed. Canadians are much better served by federal and provincial governments operating them instead.

Shopping malls provide all of us – seniors and students, urbanites and rural residents, rich and poor – with commercially vital, shared public space. Nevertheless, many Canadians take access to our shopping malls for granted. One day, one of the secretive few who “own” these vital components of our national infrastructure could choose to lock us out, or raise rents so high as to prevent retailers from serving us.

Prominent NDP legislators tell us that the time has come for the Government of Canada to declare that ownership of all shopping malls shall revert to the state after a reasonable period of time, to be determined later. Legislation would balance the competing interests of shopping mall owners, ensuring that Canadians could continue to enjoy free access to these public spaces, while providing investors with a limited right to profit from granting that access – over a limited period of time.

The other parties are more cautious, no doubt influenced by the small clique of shopping mall owners, who enjoy a virtual monopoly over our shopping experience (as long as one does not count big-box stores, plazas, and main-street shops). They propose establishing local committees that will decide where all future shopping malls will be built, and who will operate them.

Insiders say that these committees will be stacked with bureaucrats who favour getting the government into the shopping mall business. The argument in favour of public ownership is that it is the only way to keep rents low enough to ensure that all retailers will have a place. Proponents also explain that government ownership will enhance nationality security, although there is admittedly no evidence that private sector mall operators have failed on this score – at least not yet.

Critics complain that this public-ownership policy will be a constant drag on government budgets, saying that there is no reason to resort to public ownership when private-sector investors are already standing by.

A majority of citizens meanwhile appear to agree that the national interest is best served by having Canadian shopping malls owned and operated by governments for the benefit of all Canadians. Foreign mall operators are regularly vilified by all media outlets.

By now I expect many of you have checked the posting date for this article, to see if it was April 1. It wasn’t. All you have to do is replace the word “shopping mall” with “international bridge,” and every word written above can remain.

I am referring to the drama that has been unfolding in Windsor and Detroit, where a consensus appears to have been reached that one of North America’s most important transportation links, the Ambassador Bridge, should not be owned and operated by an American investor. Through regulation and lengthy court battles, the Government of Canada tried to prevent this investment from taking place in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but it eventually settled with this foreign investor instead.

Rather than directly expropriating this border crossing, the latest proposal is for the governments of Ontario, Michigan, the U.S., and Canada to build and operate a new crossing nearby instead. The new bridge will also receive the benefit of being directly linked with Ontario’s Highway 401. The same link was long promised but never delivered for the Ambassador Bridge.

Moreover, it was also recently revealed that the Government of Canada is prepared to spot the cash-strapped State of Michigan for its share of the project, with a loan of up to $550 million in Canadian tax dollars.

This is no joke. Even though the existing bridge operator has already started building a new bridge with private funding, and traffic volumes are still far below their pre-9-11 levels, the Harper government appears hell-bent on preventing an experienced U.S. investor from continuing to operate this particular piece of infrastructure.

The politicians talk about all the jobs their project can provide, but they are curiously quiet about why those same jobs wouldn’t materialize if private investment was relied upon instead. Is this really what government does best?