Those are great points. I appreciate that there is a lot to learn about P3s. It's an excellent area, so I'm really delighted that the committee is spending some time on it and trying to understand this.
Canada has emerged as a global leader, you're quite right. Its companies now, both as investors and as engineers, have taken their expertise internationally.... As I said, one of the things that has made Canada a global leader is that we're doing P3s for the right reason. That's to the point that was made before that not all P3s are a success. They're not a success if you do them for the wrong reasons.
If you look at it internationally, and in fact even if you look back at Canada, there was a big drive 20 years ago. P3s were actually a way for some governments to do things off budget. Canada has been very clear about its public accounting standards: P3 projects are on budget. It's not a way of avoiding the capital budget discipline. It's about efficiency and effectiveness. It's not about trying to skirt budget rules. In some circumstances it has been, in some countries, and that's particularly in the European context, but it's actually a technocratic question of whether or not this will deliver better value for money. Therefore, if you're driven by better value for money, you'll end up with the right result.
Canadian capital markets are strong, so we have significant life insurance, bond market.... We have, unlike other countries, created institutional capacity, so you'll see organizations like Infrastructure Ontario and Partnerships British Columbia. These are complex projects. They are complex commercial deals. It's not the kind of thing that an average department does on a regular basis, because they tend to be the larger and more complex projects. By consolidating and bringing in the right expertise to actually execute these deals, there has been significant success.
The build-out of the health system in Ontario through P3 has been an enormous success, as has the Sea-to-Sky Highway. You can go through a number of examples. It's true in Alberta, where they have built a unit within their treasury board. That institutional capacity has been quite effective.
Also, there's competition. Very strong competition and very clear rules for competition have made Canadian companies stronger, because they have been able to partner with other people, so some of that experience.... They've partnered with international firms, they have learned, and they have developed. They've been able to use that as a springboard into other projects. It's one of those ones...if you actually have a competitive market, it makes the domestic industry stronger and gets you better value for taxpayers.