I'd like to thank you for having me today.
I'm from the Conference Board of Canada. We're a not-for-profit research think tank. We've published research on this very topic in the past, and continue to be interested in the topic, because we think infrastructure delivery and obviously infrastructure services have important implications for the competitiveness of the country.
In terms of the key mechanisms and the drivers of efficiencies for P3s relative to traditional procurement, I think there are a couple of things to flag. One is that there's been kind of an ongoing debate...or actually, the debate hasn't even been had on this: it's not always clear what is and what is not a P3.
I think the CCPPP has done pretty well in terms of defining, within the space of P3s, a whole degree of different types of projects, and different levels of risk transfer, and different types of bundling of operating and maintaining phases. I think anytime we're going to be involved in a discussion of what is optimal, we have to consider the specific structure of the P3 we're talking about.
Just briefly, there is also this issue of private financing. Obviously it's going to come up. You've probably heard about it already. I think this is also an ongoing debate in terms of how strong a mechanism private financing is in terms of providing some discipline to the project and how necessary it is for the P3 structure to succeed. I think you're going to see that there's obviously a debate raging about that now as well.
Just to back up a little bit, in general when we talk about infrastructure and when the public thinks about infrastructure, we often think about public infrastructure to begin with. But it's important to note that, if we look at total investment in fixed assets, the public sector portion is a small minority. Gross fixed capital formation in the country—public sector speaking—is 16% on an annual basis, approximately, in Canada. Even if we limit that infrastructure investment on the private side to non-residential fixed structures, the private sector investment in this is over twice of what the public sector investment is.
I think it's important to keep in mind, when we're looking at the maintenance record of public infrastructure, that there is something to be learned from the large investments that are ongoing in the private sector in terms of thinking about how we could capture some of those efficiencies. How we actually do it is one thing or another, but I think it's one point that's often lost.
I'll make just one point on the breadth of P3s in Canada. We've heard a lot about them over obviously the last 10 or 15 years. There's been a large shift in terms of P3 delivery in Canada.
Just to give you a rough idea of how large it is in terms of total government expenditures on capital, if we look at P3 transactions as a percentage of government spending on infrastructure or gross fixed capital formation, we're looking at roughly 12% to 14% a year. This isn't a 75% or 80% thing. You can take that information however you want, but that's just to give you a rough idea of what the scope is.
In terms of where we are internationally, this places us in the top handful of countries. Even trailblazers like the U.K. and Australia are at 15% or 18%. They're not at that 70% or 80% level and they never will be, primarily because we have, obviously, a large number of small projects that aggregate up to be a large portion of the whole.
I'll stop there for now. I'm looking forward to the discussion.