But if you were going to get the money back, then we wouldn't need you to do it in the first place. There would be a private financial facility to do that. We have extremely advanced and highly sophisticated capital markets that have trillions of dollars available and love to lend to large-scale projects with predictable payout schedules. We wouldn't need the Infrastructure Bank to put up public money if it was all going to be paid back. That's why we have pension funds and other institutional investors to do it.
Obviously, the reason the federal government has funded a bank to do this is that either the risks are too high or the returns are too low for the private sector, in which case we are in fact subsidizing the project, which is in reality—as complicated as we might like to make it—a grant. I'm worried that whenever you complicate things, rather than just having a simple statement of what the government is doing, those who have the most sophisticated methods, the most political influence and the best lobbyists and consultants tend to profit, and then the public, who is paying for it, tends to lose, because they don't have the time, energy or resources to figure out what's going on with these extremely complicated transactions.
Second, I want to move on to some of these projects that you are involved with, such as a port terminal, a wind farm and some hydroelectricity projects. These are all projects that are supposed to generate their own revenue through user fees. They all have the capacity to charge user fees, and that's why they are typically funded privately. Why is the government getting involved in these? Your bank was set up to attract private funds to public projects. In these cases, it sounds like what you're doing is the opposite. You're taking public funds into what would otherwise be private projects. You're going in the opposite direction of what your bank was set up to do.
