I have just one quick comment. I would agree, but maybe cast it slightly differently. The issue that we confront in the long-term planning for infrastructure in Canada is not an issue related to the availability of financing and it's not an issue related to the availability of people; it's an organizational issue, a mindset issue.
The inevitable consequence of making your maintenance expenditures subject to the budgetary cycle, to the extremes that we have in this country at all three levels of government, is that you end up with maintenance backlogs that gradually evolve into infrastructure availability crises. We can see that; there are examples of that all over the country.
The issue for me is, what's the answer? We've identified a problem with the way the public sector operates. One answer is to give up on it and to pay an enormous price in terms of additional financing costs in order to get around that problem. The other is to look more carefully at the way we actually do these things in the public sector. I guess I'm an optimist. The second approach can address the fundamental structural problems in the way we've traditionally managed infrastructure in Canada, while at the same time avoiding paying these enormous penalties up front that we end up paying.
One of the observations that I'd make about P3s that is an unfortunate consequence—it's not anything that I think anybody who's promoting P3s is necessarily underlining—is they tend to reinforce this sense of unreality in people, that somehow we can get something for free, that if we have a project done through a P3, we're not paying for it; somebody else is paying for it.
I'll paraphrase my sometimes acquaintance, John Tory, who, some of you may know, made the observation—specifically with respect to public transit funding in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area—that politicians at all three levels of government have been in a state of denial when it comes to transit in Canada. They've been trying to pretend that there's some way of getting this stuff built without anybody paying for it. On that issue, I'm pretty small “c” conservative. I don't believe you can get stuff that you don't pay for. Any two-year-old knows that.
I actually don't think we're going to be able to succeed in coming to terms with this infrastructure funding and operation issue until we're able to confront the reality that we're going to have to ask people to pay for things.