Thank you, Mr. Brown.
I referred earlier to the RFP that was on the table in the summer of 2005, which was basically proposing to spin off as many of the assets as possible, whether they were office buildings, laboratories--anything. Interestingly, nobody qualified for this, which is unfortunate, in the sense that it went out there and none of the experts could qualify since it was so complicated and so well packed. I think we should all feel fortunate that nobody did, because if they had, I don't know what would have happened in terms of a transaction.
With respect to the ownership risk, and I've stated this several times already today, I think taxpayers are willing to underwrite program delivery risk. That to me is very different from a bricks-and-mortar ownership risk, which is what we're really talking about here. We don't need to own those seven buildings to deliver services to Canadians. There will be close to 11,000 to 12,000 public servants still housed in those buildings, still delivering, in some cases, store-front services in the lobby. That won't change.
One example of investments we won't have to make anymore is in the outer shell. I talked to Madame Bourgeois earlier about the 50-50 split on the day-to-day maintenance. What we've totally spun off to Larco is called the outer shell. This is the roof, exterior cladding, etc. It's called a superstructure. We estimate that for those seven buildings it's worth around $350 million over 25 years. These are sums we won't have to invest on the superstructure, which we've passed along to the private sector, where I think it belongs.