Government Operations committee  I would say that you may want to look at audit. Auditors are becoming more and more sophisticated. I have very high confidence in the audit capacity of the Deloittes and the KPMGs to provide meaningful audits of this kind.

Government Operations committee  I too am going to duck. I'm not a finance professor. This is the domain of finance professors as opposed to economists. I don't mean to put down economists, who are very good, but finance professors literally do teach and study the whole issue of the cost of capital. It's a ver

Government Operations committee  I want to be very careful in answering your question. I have lived in Ottawa all my life and I know many people in the public service. I think you have one of the finest public services in the world, meaning that it is honest. It's probably the least corrupt of any country, and I

Government Operations committee  I think they are developing the expertise in an area where we didn't have that knowledge before. One of the reasons—and this came out in the research literature—that we had so many failures in that first round in the 1990s was that people didn't know what they were doing. They we

Government Operations committee  I'll go quickly, because I think Mr. Légaré will have a much more extended answer. It's growing, but I want to echo everyone else: it doesn't solve everything. P3s are good for maybe 15% to 20% of procurement, which means that about 80% or more is not appropriate for a P3. That

Government Operations committee  Yes, I do. He's a co-author, with Vining and Boardman, of the article “Public-Private Partnerships in the U.S. and Canada: 'There Are No Free Lunches'”.

Government Operations committee  I believe that they're academically independent. I've read these articles, every one of them. I'm talking about the articles published in Canadian Public Administration. I myself have published in the journal Canadian Public Administration. Some of them are SSHRC funded, which is

Government Operations committee  I've read their material. It's not peer reviewed. They have an agenda. Fair enough—there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not peer-reviewed literature. In fact I met some of the CUPE people because we were involved in the Lansdowne dispute. It was quite interesting—I felt unco

Government Operations committee  Was your question meaning can we involve NGOs in P3s...? Is that your question?

Government Operations committee  That's right.

Government Operations committee  Quite frankly, I hadn't thought of that. There needs to be ongoing oversight, yes, because the government is the partner in the P3. That's going forward on what I said to Mr. McCallum: there has to be transparency. It doesn't have to be made public to the world, but it certainly

Government Operations committee  Are you referring to traditional procurement where the government owns the building?

Government Operations committee  I'm glad you asked that, because there is a trend that is occurring. Some of you may be aware of this trend in the private sector, where firms are selling.... For example, Scotiabank is selling their head office, and the Royal Bank is selling their head office, because they've re

Government Operations committee  I'm in withdrawal right now. There's no hockey.

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I know you don't want me to go into Lansdowne, and I won't get into the details. I'm not going to name names or that sort of thing, but my generic criticism was simply that there were too many moving parts. There were too many different businesses in the package, wit