VANCOUVER, CANADA — In a trip across Canada this week, as local leaders jostled one another to praise him as a statesman they could learn from, there was a moment when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger might have taken some notes of his own.
At a Vancouver construction site that he dropped by, workers were busily boring a tunnel for the type of public works project that the governor has been unable to get off the ground at home: one owned and operated entirely by a private company.
A 12-mile rail line that will connect Vancouver's waterfront to its airport is one of dozens of ventures like it in Canada. Provinces are turning to private companies to build and operate trains, roads, public hospitals, university facilities -- even local schools.
"The way they do it is, I think, the right way to go," Schwarzenegger said in an interview. "We don't have to exactly copy it, but we can learn from those ideas."
He said that Wall Street is clamoring to invest in private infrastructure projects and that California must examine ways to "benefit from all the private money that is out there."
The governor has long championed the sort of large-scale privatization seen in Canada, calling it a solution to bureaucratic inertia and inefficiency in state government. Put services in the hands of the private sector, his argument goes, and the potential for profit will bring a new urgency to providing for the public.
But as other governments in North America and elsewhere move swiftly ahead with such plans, Schwarzenegger's privatization campaign is faltering.
Days before the Vancouver visit, a legislative committee unceremoniously dumped the governor's proposal to hire a few hundred private-sector engineers to help Caltrans with the cumbersome business of designing roads. Ideas he backed for building private toll roads, enlisting private firms to construct courthouses and contracting out more prison operations have stalled. A proposal to allow businesses to run freeway rest stops has been on the shelf for years.
"All new things take time for the legislators to really get familiar with," Schwarzenegger said with characteristic optimism. "We don't want to rush it and then make mistakes."
But proponents of the projects have grown dismayed as tens of billions of dollars in private investment have found a home elsewhere.
