One of them would be that infrastructure investments should be maintained at a level of somewhere between 4% and 5% of GDP. One of the facts of our history is that we were at that level, and then there was a dip, and we're paying for the fact that we took our foot off the pedal for a period of probably a couple of decades. The lesson there is that we need an appropriate and sustained level of investment in infrastructure.
The second lesson would be that it is much more effective for infrastructure investments to be framed in long-term, predictable financing arrangements, so that our interests—well, in our case, obviously municipalities—are able to understand the level of investments from the federal government and understand it over the long term so that they can actually plan.
When we find ourselves in an environment in which infrastructure funding is short term and ad hoc, what that situation means is that municipalities can't plan for the long term. It's harder to plan for a sustainability agenda, harder to plan for a P3 environment, if you don't know what your longer-term investment scenario is going to look like.
That's covering some degree of order of magnitude, the long term and the predictable. I think it is a fair assessment that all three orders of government are in this, as well as private sector and other entities, but right now my remarks are specifically with the three orders of government. The three orders of government need to be putting resources into the game so that the collective investment in infrastructure is significant and sizeable.
Also, if you're going to frame infrastructure programming that is going to have results on the ground, you have to work with the municipalities. The municipalities have to be partners in the design of whatever the infrastructure investment program or framework is going to be and in the design of the metrics that allow us over time to monitor and evaluate success of those investments. I would say that's the key.
There are three features there that I think are lessons learned from where we've come from, over...I know this study is 20 years, but one could expand the scope beyond that and consider those as key lessons learned.