The purpose is to use federal support strategically in a project, to put the minimal amount of federal support needed to absorb a risk in a project that would otherwise not have been built or has too much risk, particularly for another government and the private investor to come together.
The comparator would be a project where governments bear all the risk and pay all the funding. So even the federal government would have paid more. The objective is to have the merchant bank or the Canada infrastructure bank work with other partners, including municipal, provincial, or other federal partners, to determine the minimal amount of support needed to make a project viable.