That's not the case at all.
Given Mr. Alghabra's question, it's good to remind ourselves that the banks sold buildings. If there's one industry where people are there for profit, we think it's obviously the banking industry. If there was so much money to be made in running your own bricks and mortar, Mr. Alghabra, they wouldn't be selling those buildings. And everybody has. I'm sure you can find this out on your own, but even the retailers now--large department stores like The Bay--have thought about spinning off the real estate portion of their assets because it's really not part of their core function. And if it's not part of theirs, with respect, I think it's not part of ours.
With regard to Informetrica, there are two issues that I have with the analysis. The first is that they assume the behaviour of the government as an owner of the asset would change drastically over the next 25 years. I'm talking about being consistent year after year in terms of investing the money, doing it on time, and with no cost overruns. That's not just today while I'm here, but in 5 years or 25 years. They assume that all these checks and balances are going to be done and that they are going to be done properly. As a witness I have our past behaviour as successive governments and how we've neglected the assets--money and otherwise--and I can't buy this. For them to suggest that at the end of the day this asset would be worth so much in our hands is ignoring decades of behaviour.
The other point is that they attribute a value to these nine assets that is totally unrealistic. We had an auction. If I had come here today and told you Monsieur Guimont went to Larco and signed a private deal, then people would say why them, why not others?
This was a very robust auction. There were ten or eleven people who actually bid. Eighty-six books were requested, and there were eleven bids. This is as robust as they come in Canada. We chose the highest bidder. I respectfully suggest to those who believe otherwise that this is the market value of these assets, i.e., the result of a robust auction. We chose Larco because they were the highest bidder.