Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll start by saying I'm fairly certain that everyone in this meeting, witnesses and committee members alike, understands that infrastructure is the key to accelerating economies and is the key to repairing damage to economies. In fact, we're coming up on the 100th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's new deal, which took the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In fact, our own government has been involved in a $180-billion new deal. For the last several years, we've been investing in communities across the country. However, with the advent of COVID and the well-known infrastructure gap articulated by FCM, among other groups, and articulated by Ms. Bull this evening to be around $500 billion, depending on how you measure it, with the need to connect the country by broadband, the need to fight a climate war and the overwhelming need to invest more in indigenous communities, certainly now is the time that we need to be doing more to invest in communities.
What we've been doing so far, what governments tend to do, is to leverage federal tax dollars to get more provincial tax dollars and more municipal tax dollars. However, I think all of us on this call understand there's really only one taxpayer. The beauty of the CIB is that we can then use that taxpayer's dollars to leverage private capital, which is, of course, the whole intention of the CIB.
Ms. Bull, understanding that, I wonder if you could share with us the impact you see of private sector capital in first nations communities, on reserve, in remote communities, to achieve the things that need to be achieved in those communities.