Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to start with a question for Mr. Gill.
You mentioned in your presentation that inadequate transportation infrastructure is costing Toronto something like $11 billion a year in lost economic activity. I'd like to do a little calculation, if you'll bear with me, and just ask if you would agree with it.
Let's just take one-tenth of that $11 billion a year, so $1 billion a year. We know that the Government of Canada can borrow money at about 3% per year. Let's say we borrow it for 30 years and we pay off 3% of the principle every year. So 3% plus 3%, that's about 6%. That means that Canada could borrow $15 billion and pay it off over roughly 30 years to spend on infrastructure, which is about roughly the size of the Building Canada plan. It seems to me that on just one-tenth of the lost economic opportunity from Toronto transportation infrastructure you could spend the whole Building Canada plan, and that would be a good investment. To me that suggests you could spend a lot more than the Building Canada plan if you could pay for $15 billion of spending from just 10% of the lost economic activity because of poor transportation infrastructure in one city, Toronto.
Would you agree with that calculation? And would you agree that we could spend more on infrastructure and get a good return on that spending?