Thanks for the question.
The issue of operations and maintenance is key. We all like new shiny things. Politically we like cutting ribbons. You don't see a lot of ribbon cutting when a building gets rehabilitated or when it gets maintained, but this is really critical. It's just like your house. If you take a year or two off, maybe the first year you don't notice anything, then the second year you start to see issues. If this continues over an extended period of time, the cost multiplies in terms of small things that then become major and need rehabilitation, and not just things that regular maintenance would pick up but serious rehabilitation and replacement, so the predictability of the funding is critical.
Part of the challenge is that operations and maintenance are often funded locally. If we think of transit, it gets provincial and federal funding for the capital costs, and then the operation and maintenance comes from the fare box. It comes from local government subsidies, and in some cases it comes from ad hoc contributions from different levels of government.
We need to make this much more predictable and ongoing. The numbers I cited around 20-80 are anecdotes that I hear when I go out to speak to infrastructure folks. It would be interesting to do a quantitative study over the long term. These things multiply. One of the points about public-private partnerships that is worth keeping in mind is that they do generally ring-fence money for operations and maintenance, so when you talk to senior government officials about them, they say they know they're paying more for this up front, but one of the things they do is put operations and maintenance, the life cycle of these assets, on the books for their whole life.
I don't think we necessarily need to be using public-private partnerships to lock that in. We, as a government, need to become much more sensible. If we're building assets new, we have to recognize that significant operation and maintenance costs are going to be predictable and are going to be there every year, because if we don't, it's going to add up and it's going to start to cost us in the long run.