Well, I think since I've been in a senior level of public service, obviously the use of public-private partnerships is something Canada has done a lot of work on, and British Columbia was a leader in that way.
I came from the health sector, and as deputy of health was responsible for building the first public-private partnership hospital in British Columbia, the Abbotsford Regional Hospital, a long-awaited facility. Obviously, that is a way of leveraging private capital. At the city level, to undertake a P3 that's the size of a hospital....
We have a lot of infrastructure. My city engineer here is responsible for a significant percentage of what is anywhere from a $250 million to $300 million capital spend on an annual basis in the city of Vancouver. We're learning how to leverage private capital in different ways, at a smaller scale, as well as the big projects such as this proposal we've put on the table today, the Broadway line. Certainly a lot of the transit infrastructure that has been built in metro Vancouver has been through P3 arrangements—not all of it. Whether or not that would work for the Broadway extension really depends on the criteria. So I think that's a major way....
We have a lot of different initiatives under way right now. We're leveraging private capital through partnerships that are not as formal as a traditional P3 but cause us to end up in the same place.
We know that pension funds are interested in housing now. They're moving out of some of their more traditional real estate holdings, and they're very interested in market residential housing and seniors housing. Housing is a huge priority, as you know, for Vancouver, and we're looking at those sorts of opportunities.
They're complex, and I think one of the most important things for our senior levels of government to understand is that there are no free goods out there. If you leverage private capital, it still has to be paid for; financing costs have to come with it. It's understanding what a deal looks like, what the impact will be over the long term, and how a local government that doesn't have the same fiscal capacity as a senior level of government is going to manage that long-term relationship.
I think that's a learning point for municipalities across the country. There is a lot of great work being done, and some really remarkable partnerships, some of which are long-standing. We're building our capacity in that area.