FOCUS: PARTNERSHIPS BC

Partnering with British Columbia

Sarah Clark, the new president and chief executive officer of Partnerships BC, discusses the key reasons behind the organisation's past success in PPPs and its plans for the future

Clark: taking advantage of low-cost borrowing

SARAH CLARK DIDN'T need any convincing of the merits of delivering infrastructure via PPPs. As a project manager at Bombardier in the early 2000s, Canada's rail and aerospace manufacturing giant, she developed bids for multiple business opportunities - including Vancouver's recently opened Canada Line rapid transit link.

"I realised, on the bidder side, how different your thinking becomes when you have an investment in the infrastructure for the longer term. And I thought, 'wow, what a great model to have the people who are designing and building it also responsible for operating and maintaining the asset over a fxed term of 20 to 30 years,'" she says.

Now Clark, an engineer by training, evaluates all future provincial infrastructure projects over $50 million in cost across the province of British Columbia. In October, after five years in a senior project delivery role at Partnerships BC, British Columbia's procurement body for PPPs, she took over the organisation's top job from former head Larry Blain.

Blain led Partnerships BC since its creation in 2002 as a government-owned company. The goal was to teach the public sector "to look at alternatives, new ideas and fresh solutions", former British Columbia Finance Minister Gary Collins said in a statement when he announced its creation.

"We had a number of projects that had been talked about for years and hadn't been completed," recalls Clark. Once Partnerships BC was created, "projects finally entered the market and were completed on time or ahead of schedule, and on budget".