Actually, it's almost the other way around. Our firms in North America—not just in Canada, but in the United States as well— use the bonding facility to leverage their own balance sheets, and they can do so by 15 to 20 times. What the bonding regime does for them is allow them to operate on rather large projects and use contract performance security that doesn't hamper or restrict their other abilities to get an operating line, etc., which would be hampered in situations in which you had to put up letters of credit, for example.
To give you an idea of how important it is for construction companies to have a healthy bonding limit, not only can you not bid on significant work for the federal government without bonds, but if Bill 142 passes in the Ontario legislature later this year, all construction projects in Ontario will be bonded, by statute. It becomes absolutely critical, then, for any firm of any size that works for the provincial government in Ontario to ensure that they have bonding capacity. One way you have by which to do so is to keep a fairly healthy balance sheet.