Absolutely.
Again, these are workarounds. There have been attempts in some communities to access this. The First Nations Finance Authority is an attempt to do that. There are attempts to use ministerial guarantees. You use the Crown as the backstop for the loan by a first nation.
It is the first nation that's doing the building, doing the contracting, hiring the architects and hiring the contractors and the firms. This is a real struggle—truth to power—because these are often small communities, small governments and small staff. These are hard things for the City of Montreal or the City of Lethbridge; it's very tough on a first nations community to deliver this.
Most communities will always need some kind of partner to work with, and, unless there's going to be a turning off of the tap of taxpayers' dollars, somebody has to manage the flow of taxpayers' dollars from Parliament to these communities, which is why I think we should try. If you just keep trying the same model and you're not getting better results, you should at least try a different approach.
The difference is that you're having a lively political debate about the cost of mortgages for young families in Canada. Underneath that is the assumption that almost everywhere in the world and everywhere else in Canada, housing and infrastructure is largely debt-financed. It's not cash up front. The only people who pay cash up front are Aboriginal Affairs, Indigenous Services and maybe the Saudi Arabians. Everybody else uses some form of debt financing to build assets with a long life. Infrastructure and housing would fit in that, including power grids, water, waste water, Internet connections and so on.
We did a lot that we could on a cash basis. We did a very innovative market finance deal in northern Ontario that you're probably familiar with, the Watay Power thing, which brought electricity to about 20 communities in northwestern Ontario. It will come online this fall, which I'm very pleased to see.
That's the direction to push in. It's not just pouring more money into the broken social housing model; it's trying to find ways to access private capital markets and get two to one, three to one or four to one leverage—whatever Parliament is able to provide.