Thank you to the witnesses for making time for us today and for sharing your thoughts and expertise with us on this important issue of infrastructure in Canada. As you commented, it is a very timely issue. We're all abuzz about infrastructure these days.
Professor Siemiatycki, you mentioned an interesting point about the cost share between actual capital or construction costs for infrastructure and operations and maintenance, it being a 20-80 split respectively. This study is meant to take a retrospective view of investment and infrastructure in Canada, and I think the timing is 20 years.
The timing doesn't really matter. The data we've seen shows that there's been a slowing of infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP in this country since the late 1950s or something like that, leading to a low point in the late 1990s where there was a net depreciation of infrastructure in Canada. While the funds look bigger now, we've had a Parliamentary Budget Officer study also on the infrastructure funds under our current government showing significant lapses in funding, so continuing underinvestment in infrastructure funding in Canada.
Can you tell us whether this underinvestment in infrastructure, given that so much of the funding should be going to operations and maintenance, is costing us money? Is it more economical to provide stable, predictable funding to maintain operations and maintenance of built infrastructure in this country?