Not exactly: I'm arguing that the political interests of members of Parliament, who are of course elected to represent their constituencies—their citizens, their voters—may express views that contradict the professionals.
There are a lot of people, as we all know, who don't have a deep professional understanding, whether it be economics.... I'm excepting somebody like a Dr. McCallum; a lot of people don't understand economics. A lot of people are not engineers. I'm not a professional engineer. Yet the political process can impose demands on you, the member of Parliament, and that in turn feeds into the process. That's at the front end.
Then on the back end, I'm talking about the maintenance of the program. Governments defer maintenance all the time because it's invisible. People don't see the money that's being transferred from maintenance into some other project. When I was testifying before the City of Ottawa on this, I said that elected officials like shiny new objects. Maintenance is very boring. Replacing sewers and that sort of thing is not very sexy. We have $300 million of deferred maintenance on sewers in this city. That was a collective decision made over time, year after year, to defer maintenance. It's not because you're bad people or immoral people; it's simply because that's the nature of the political process.