Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, Madam Fraser, gentlemen, for appearing here today.
I think that perhaps many of us have had business experience, although on a smaller scale, on property owning, rental, and management. We certainly can understand that circumstances change. It's far better to save your business and not make that move to the new plant that you're projecting to do, and to eat the losses of your commitments on your lease, even before you move in and indeed have two rental properties at the same time under way, than to have the alternative, which might be to lose your business.
So there certainly are circumstances, but those types of circumstances would be substantial circumstances that would be readily identifiable. They wouldn't simply be--and I don't want to call it a clerical error--a management error on making a decision. They would be a change, a dramatic shift in circumstances.
My questions that I want to talk about are more about buying versus leasing and circumstances in Edmonton, where recently they built two armouries on a long-lease basis for the military. I understand that military properties are under Public Works too.
My concern there is this. When we travel around the country we see armouries that are 100 years old, 150 years old, in other words, armouries aren't for short-term usage. They're long term, and very seldom do you see an armoury that is torn down, other than in order maybe to build a new one.
I would like to know how a decision is made to do that, or is that more just to simply offload those building costs and download it to another generation under lower-cost lease payments, rather than the higher cost, at the front end, of building an armoury? Is that what really would happen on that, or would there be a decision made to lease an armoury or lease a building that you know you're going to be in all likelihood using for a hundred years?