The critical thing in my mind, to define whether it has been successful, is whether it has both met our development impact objectives and been at least self-financing, so that it is truly able to return the amounts invested and perhaps a bit of premium on top of it to the Canadian purse, and recycle that into future financing.
Certainly, if we look at the experience of other DFIs, we see that they've been pretty good at the financial imperative. As I mentioned, the British CDC has not drawn on the public purse for 15 years. OPIC earns about eight dollars for every dollar invested in its budget by the U.S. government on an annual basis.
I'm advocating that we go into riskier situations, and into riskier projects and sectors. That means our returns probably aren't going to be as high, but I think that if we were able to ensure that we're at least returning to the DFI that which it has put in, with a slight premium to finance its operations, we'll be doing extremely well.
The other thing is that if we are taking the development impact objective as seriously as the financial impact, that may also reduce our returns. OPIC, CDC, and other DFIs have been criticized—rightly, I think—for not putting enough emphasis on setting, monitoring, and incentivizing those development objectives. If we actually do so, that's going to be a mark of our success. That will be a mark of our distinctiveness. It may somewhat reduce our fiduciary returns, but if it's a question between earning two or three dollars on every dollar we put in, rather than the eight dollars that OPIC gets out, I actually think that's a pretty decent trade-off, and a reasonable and very responsible use of the public purse.