I think that's the case. For one reason, the Edmonton P3 schools were modular; they were basically all the same design. That helped to accelerate it.
There's no secret to a lot of these things. If you bundle them like that, you can obviously move much faster. If you throw more money at a problem, you can accelerate those things. If you have life-cycle costing within government, that can deal with it. That can ensure some maintenance money as well.
Mr. Trottier raised some issues about the timing. One thing about P3s—and you didn't see this in that report—is that they require a lot more planning up front, so often when they're comparing P3s against traditional procurement, they're not doing it from the same baseline.
Another thing I wanted to follow up on, in terms of the Edmonton public schools, is that although you can see a lot of the contracts online and there's a lot of detail online, the key financial information is missing. A number of organizations went to court for two or three years just to get the financial information on the Brampton hospital, one of the first P3s in Ontario. Supposedly, it was saving hundreds of millions of dollars. That's an issue of transparency. Then the auditor looked at it and found that it actually cost $600 million more than it supposedly did, according to the value-for-money audit, and that if it had been done publicly it would have cost $200 million less. That's an independent assessment.
It's really important. It may be simple to say you need to fix the value-for-money reports and you need to have transparency, but it's a really big thing, a really important thing.