Let me be brief, though, given the hour.
If someone can take and buy the property and do something with it that is not going to be otherwise done, and that new use of that property is a positive contribution to the town they're in or to the businesses they're running, then you might say that it was a worthwhile transaction. And it may well be that the tenant of that building, who had previously been the owner, sold it but didn't want to make that change, and now the new owner can and the old owner can have that residual place of residence.
A very good example of this is what's gone on in many major cities where the air rights of certain buildings have effectively been sold. People have extended a building upward, or they've taken the air over the railroad tracks and built a building, and the train goes underneath it. CN would never have developed the building above it, so you're therefore getting better value out of the whole piece of real estate.
In this case, to my knowledge, we have not seen on the table any proposals for changing the configuration of the buildings. We have the same tenant in the same space for 25 years. So it's not clear that there's this opportunity for innovation or change, the hallmark of which, in the past, has been the assembling of a number of pieces property and the creation of some new, major structure. We don't see that happening here. Now maybe we don't see it because they don't want us to know it's going on, and the people who are buying all this stuff will eventually reveal the grand plan they have. And that's fine, because it's in their interest to keep people in the dark if they're going to be buying up other pieces of property that are related to this area.
The other reason it happens is that you have someone who is cash-strapped. So you may have an organization that owns a building. They can't borrow any more from the bank, so they say, “What can we do? Well, let's sell it. We have someone who wants that real estate. Maybe they want the property it's on and will eventually do something with it. Maybe we can get a good deal to lease it back cheaply and then, effectively, have some financing to continue our operation. And anyway, we're not in the real estate business.” That's the other term that is often raised by someone like that.
Now, you can imagine some governments being in that position. You know, some of the provinces in the thirties were on the verge of bankruptcy. Maybe, if they'd been such financial innovators as we are today, they would have had opportunities to sell off some of their properties and lease them back. But by and large, the current position of the federal government would not appear to be that of a cash-strapped entity. Certainly the surpluses that have been appearing now for a number of years would suggest that there's no major financial constraint that they're trying to appease through this particular transaction. They're not going to be able to borrow as a result of this transaction at a significantly lower rate than if they had not undertaken this transaction, and they haven't told us that this is a sale for some purpose. It isn't a case of telling us what they are going to spend the $1.4 billion on. It will just go into general revenues and will be parcelled out in tax cuts or in other actions or as debt reduction at some later point in time. So I don't see that innovation, that imagination, and the application of the funds as being evident in this transaction. Those would be the kinds of things you would look for.
I mean, people buy and sell real estate. It's not an odd thing. It's a huge market, and it's happening all the time. But in this particular case you ask them again to explain why they're doing this when the value they're getting for this seems to be a low value. That's all we're asking.