I think the federal government has a scale from zero to 100. In certain areas the federal government has assumed 100% of the costs of museums, which we outline here. That decision was made in the past, and you live with it. These numbers here are nothing compared to the numbers it takes to run a major national museum.
To talk about quantifying the role of the federal government, the first way to quantify it is to share the costs with other people. I think everybody now wants to find new creative ways for the government to do things, how they can spend less and get more--this is the old saying.
I've had the privilege of being involved with a PPP, a public-private partnership, in Montreal for 18 years. We formed Montréal International 18 years ago, which is a public-private partnership with the federal government, the provincial government, the municipal government, and the public sector, and it has worked like a charm. We have two mandates: one is to get international organizations to set up their headquarters in Montreal--we now have 70 of them in Montreal; the other mandate is to get international investors to invest, and we've been doing very well with that.
It works fine, but every one of the governments is not picking up the whole cost of this, and it's also sharing with the private sector. This is the model. We think this is a good model for the federal government to carry out its obligation to look after the heritage, the railway heritage. It's cheap. I'm going to be blunt about it: it's a cheap way to get into this. Even paying $4 million a year is peanuts in comparison to what they're paying for the Canada Aviation Museum or anything else. So this is a relatively easy way for the federal government to get involved, preserve the railway heritage, and yet not have to pay a fortune to do it.
Now, quantifying that, the way it really works when you have a partnership is each year you sit down around the table and look at what you're going to do and what it's going to cost. In the Montréal International example, we do three-year contracts with the three levels of government. We sit down, we work out our budget, then they sign up and commit to put money in over a three-year period, then we'll look at the next three-year period and so on, and that's how that works. So nobody's getting stuck forever on a sum of money, and they sit around the table on the board so they can see what's going on; they get the reports. They know what's happening, so they know we're not spending money improperly or what have you.
It's a way to make sure people are getting value for their dollar, which is I think what the governments want to see these days. So that's our proposal. If we can work that out, bring in the governments and work that, I think we have a way to find a new way of dealing with the preservation of Canadian heritage, which keeps everybody involved. And it's not expensive; individually it's not expensive.