Does that meet the test of a two-to-one return on investment? I'm not willing to concede that that's a private sector entity. I mean, you have something that is a creature of a provincial government, that is created by an act of provincial parliament, that receives money for funding its operations and its investments from the provincial taxpayer. Certainly the Parliamentary Budget Officer doesn't seem to agree that this counts as private sector money.
What we were led to believe when the Prime Minister came back from the fanciest cocktail circuit you could ever imagine, that of the uber-rich, the 1% of the 1%, was that he had been convinced that if he were to create this infrastructure bank, these private sector entities from all over the world would just trip over themselves to put their cash, their investors' cash, into these projects.
So far, the only two projects you can point to that have private sector money are the REM project in Montreal, which is using Quebec pensioners' contributions, the funds that Quebec pensioners have been mandated to pay through their payroll deductions, and the irrigation project, which is being funded by the irrigation districts, which, as I mentioned, are creations of the provincial government itself. Those are the only two projects.
Where are the independent private sector hedge funds, the private sector mutual funds, the private sector banks, the private sector capital that this government promised when it made the announcements for this corporate plan? Your own mandate states that you were going to be leveraging two to one. In the October 2016 economic statement, former finance minister Bill Morneau said that it could be as high as four to one, and it's just not there: $163 million to $400 million is not two to one.