Thank you, Mr. Bachrach. I'll try to be brief.
Absolutely, there is a need for funding for infrastructure in small communities. There is a serious need across the country in a number of different sectors, particularly in municipal utilities and other upgrades and retrofits that would meet the government's climate mitigation goals, which are good and we celebrate.
But the CIB model, as we saw play out in Mapleton, demonstrated an unsuitability for that context. The pace of the project start-up, legal consultation and negotiation of contracts was a significant cost to the town, which paid hundreds of thousands of dollars without getting a project in the end. When they looked at the CIB project package they were considering versus funding the project themselves through capital debt, they realized that it would be cheaper to do it themselves because they could finance the project at much cheaper rates themselves.
That experience I think would be for small municipalities across the country that have limited financial resources and are wary of getting into more expensive P3 contracts.
There is a separate answer here, too, to a question you didn't ask, which is the suitability of private corporations being involved in decisions about the public infrastructure that is so vital to Canadians' health, like water and waste water, but you didn't ask that question, so—