Madam Chair, a very extensive set of factors is taken into account, built into the equations we use. If you like, we would be happy to walk you through them. There are probably close to 100 factors. They include inflation, include discounting the future value to net present value in order to compare like with like in assessing purchasing versus leasing, and so on. We also include the mid-life fit-ups that are necessary if you buy a building, so that we can take that into account.
The issue about whether our forecasting is good and valid or we should change it is a very important one. The reason I'm going to pause on that and elaborate a little bit is that very often we will make a forecast of that kind and then find that various pressures of one kind and another, budgetary and otherwise, mean we don't get the money to do the mid-life fit-up.
So what we forecast should be the value of a property 25 years down turns out.... We end up with a property that needs to be torn down, because it hasn't been maintained, and so the business case, if you like, doesn't pan out in reality, because if we had leased and had had the landlord do the maintenance, it might have looked more expensive, but in the end you might have been still in a building that is worth occupying.
Those are the very serious issues we want to deal with. In government it's very hard to look back, pull your file out from 25 years ago, and say it did pan out as we thought it would.
What we have right now is an inventory of federally owned properties that have several billion dollars' worth of backlog to bring them up to standard. Now we are faced with trying to figure out how to access enough funds to get that done. Even if we got the funds, could we do it in a timeframe that is reasonable? These are issues we're grappling with right now.