Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
We've seen a number of collapses of P3 projects. Most recently in British Columbia there were massive cost overruns. The principle seems to be to socialize the risk on taxpayers but to privatize the profits.
My question is twofold.
First, what is the return that is expected around these projects? Of course, that increases the cost of the project. The CCPA estimates it doubles the cost. When we talk about Mapleton, one of the five projects and one of the few new announcements, what are the user fees that are contemplated? One of the former CEOs of the Infrastructure Bank said that “users will fund the bulk of the operations and of the returns to investors through user-fees”. This is actually something that I would say is patently not in the public interest—people paying for water so the return on investment can be enhanced for private sector investors.
What is the bank's plan for privatizing assets like that, assets that should be held in common, to privatize, to impose user fees, and what are the user fees going to be in the case of the Mapleton water and waste-water project?