I think part of the appeal of the public-private partnership is that it allows the public to evade the hard choice that this might have to be funded principally by government.
If you look at the poll a little more carefully, though, those who didn't pick were given three choices initially between public-private partnerships, private sector, or public sector. When you exclude those who picked the very popular, but easy to pick, public-private partnership, the remaining portion, by a two-to-one margin, assigned governments the responsibility.
When we probe further, of those who picked either government or public-private partnership and were asked which levels of government should be most responsible, by an overwhelming majority the federal government was tagged with the ultimate responsibility. I believe it was something like six times as large as the instances of people who assigned responsibility to the provincial government. Nobody in the poll thought the municipal governments were going to be paying the freight on this one.
I think the public actually have a reasonable understanding of this. We had other questions, for example, that asked whether people thought this would be self-sustaining eventually. By a margin of about 60-40, the public felt this would require an ongoing commitment from governments, in particular the federal government--something they said they would support.
People glaze over at the enormous sums being spent on infrastructure and deficits and so forth, but we mentioned billions of dollars explicitly in the explanation to the respondents, and although it did tend to reduce the enthusiasm somewhat, it did not increase the opposition. People answered with an understanding that this was not a trivial investment; this is not something that private sectors were going to produce and that the public would then be able to purchase. They didn't think that once it was put in place it would be profitable and wouldn't require ongoing support. The public support for this exists even with an assumption that it will require substantial ongoing support.