If you build it, they will come. And pay the toll.

When Highway 407 opened in 1997, drivers not only came, they kept coming back — transforming the toll road into a short-lived success story.

Two years later, the storyline changed: The PC government of the day took an abrupt detour by brokering a 99-year lease of the highway for a fraction of its true value.

If you lease it — and undervalue it — they will profit. At our expense.

The 407 deal is now considered a financial blunder on a par with Newfoundland’s lease of Churchill Falls to Quebec, and China’s surrender of Hong Kong to Britain, for equally ill-fated 99-year leases.

As today’s Liberal government ponders selling off part of Hydro One’s transmission lines, after more than a century of public ownership, the 407 debacle looms over the debate. Unless we learn the lessons of that fiasco, we are condemned to be fleeced once again.

If the toll highway hadn’t been handed off for a pittance in 1999, it could have been paid off by now. Imagine driving free on the 407, instead of being hit up for steadily increasing tolls that have flowed to the consortium’s overseas owners for years.

Better yet, imagine a government with the spine and sagacity to raise tolls to what the market would bear — as the consortium did, but as no politician seems willing to try — and then used those windfall profits to bankroll the infrastructure spending this province so badly needs. If those revenues had flowed all this time to the public treasury, the financial pressure to privatize Hydro One would be less intense today.

Built at taxpayer expense for about $1.5 billion, the 407 was handed over to the new private operators for an unconscionably low $3.1 billion. In a classic example of short-term calculations versus long term stewardship of a public asset, the Tories declared a $1.6 billion “profit” from the sale to meet their politically-inspired deficit targets.

It was a monumental miscalculation: A 6 per cent share in the consortium that had originally been valued at $45 million in 1999 attracted a price four times higher by 2002 — prompting independent financial analysts to argue that the lease was worth more than $12 billion all along.

In their privatization frenzy, the PC government left $9 billion on the table — and tens of billions more to be harvested from higher tolls in future. That’s a lot of billion-dollar-boondoggles rolled into one toll road.

When an NDP government proposed the highway in the early 1990s, they estimated it would pay for itself in 30 years with only modest increases in tolls. At the time of the lease, then-PC premier Mike Harris vowed that the private operator could not raise tolls by more than 3 cents a kilometre through 2014 — a 30 per cent cap. Instead, those tolls have increased more than 300 per cent — from about 10 cents a kilometre in 1999 to more than 30 cents today.

Over the years, the 407 consortium has invested in widening the highway, but it has been handsomely rewarded. In 2014, the consortium earned a profit of $222.9 million on gross revenues of $887.6 million. Little wonder the consortium — now owned by Cintra Infraestructuras Internacional, the CPP Investment Board, and SNC-Lavalin — boosted its dividend to shareholders by 75 per cent last year.

All these years later, with the 407 taking away so much money, what are the takeaways for public policy?

One lesson is that governments will be held to account long after the deal is done, and any blunders will have a lasting impact on our political discourse: The seeming unfairness of rapid toll hikes — however commercially justified or environmentally sound — have soured Ontarians on the merits of road pricing. That’s unfortunate, because road tolls are a vital tool for fighting congestion provided there’s an honest broker, not a private profiteer, collecting the cash.

Another lesson is that the 407 debacle has made Ontarians more leery of privatization. Even the Tories had second thoughts about selling off Hydro One.

Now the Liberals seem ready to pick up where the PCs left off. If there is a case to be made for reducing the government’s role in the strategic electricity sector, it had better be a good one — better than the last one.

If you bungle it, they will remember.

$41: the approximate cost to drive the 407 from Burlington to Pickering during rush hour.

$3.1 billion: price province received for leasing the highway in 1999

$887.6 million: revenues earned by 407 International Inc. for 2014

$6.5 billion: revenues earned by Hydro One last year

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$12.5 billion: Queen’s Park’s budget deficit

Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn