Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing today on what I think is an important study on how we can ensure or how competition can make infrastructure dollars go further. Obviously various levels of government deal with the reality that resources, being tax revenues, are not unlimited. Taxpayers expect value for the hard-earned money they pay out in taxes, whether it's property tax or provincial or federal income tax. I think this is a valuable study for us to be undertaking.
Mr. Buda, if I fairly summarize your position, you've been critical of any requirement in a federal-provincial agreement on infrastructure that would stipulate there must be open tendering, if you will, for infrastructure projects. You've said that such a requirement would increase costs on municipalities by an undefined amount. Do you have any sense of what it costs municipalities in Nova Scotia, for example, to comply with that? I understand that the Canada-Nova Scotia agreement in effect since 2007 stipulates, “The contract award process will be competitive, fair and transparent”. That rules out not only sole-source contracts but union-only processes.
Do you have a sense of what it costs municipalities there?