To be fair to Ms. Chow, I don't think she was suggesting that the government open its bank book and start handing out money. I think she was suggesting that in a study of the most efficient way to spend the money we have, we seem to be very narrowly focused on only three fairly small ways to make the money go further. In our view, she's suggesting that we look at other places in the world that have created more efficient models for spending limited tax dollars. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think she's suggesting that we just open up the vault.
Instead, I'd like to study more in depth how to spend infrastructure dollars. If a model of spending infrastructure dollars in another country includes a competition between the private and the public sector for the bid, why wouldn't we want to study that? If a model in another country includes a mechanism whereby municipalities have to justify their infrastructure needs in a certain way, or have to create a mechanism that satisfies the federal funding model and that perhaps achieves other federal objectives than merely putting in the infrastructure, why would we limit ourselves in studying how this infrastructure could be implemented?
I'm not suggesting that the three items on there should not be studied. We may discover that increased private sector infrastructure is not the way to go or that red tape reduction is a red herring and there isn't a whole lot of red tape in infrastructure spending. I don't know. However, to limit ourselves to those three fairly narrow topics would make it a very short study and I think would not necessarily give us all the possible ways of making infrastructure dollars go further, which is what the premise of the consideration of the subcommittee was.
Making infrastructure dollars go further is something that I think both sides of the committee would like to achieve, but I think that limiting ourselves to a very narrow way of looking at how to make the infrastructure dollars go further limits our ability to study the matter and come to the right conclusions.