Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Cory, for appearing today before the committee.
Mr. Cory, I read the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report this morning with great concern. This reads to me like a pretty stunning indictment of the Canada Infrastructure Bank to date. These are some of the things mentioned in that report.
The bank is now on its third chair and its second CEO. It has paid millions of dollars in severance—we're not quite sure for what, because it couldn't have been for performance.
It has only invested $1.23 billion [Technical difficulty—Editor] out the door. That's only 3.5% of the 10-year investment target for the bank, so it's way behind. Of the 420 applications [Technical difficulty—Editor] 45% of them were rejected because they didn't fit the bank's mandate. This raises huge questions.
Of course, what's making headlines this morning is the fact that the bank hasn't delivered on what was really its biggest promise [Technical difficulty—Editor] much-lauded private investment. We had the Prime Minister saying, “the infrastructure bank will allow us to create new historic investments in infrastructure that go well beyond what we are putting on the table.” But of course, it hasn't. This is an utter failure by the very terms of success set by the bank itself and by the minister.
The other thing that's very concerning is the way the bank has defined success. We've heard from all kinds of witnesses who have pointed out that the ideological fixation with leveraging private capital is deeply problematic. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has promised private investors returns of somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7% to 9%. The question is, where does that return come from? Well, it comes from communities; it comes from citizens. The costs for those projects are higher because of the profits that have to go to the private investors, and that's simply not in the public interest. We've heard that again and again.
The fact is that the Liberals have spent considerable time and money trying to make this model work, and what the PBO's report today shows is that it's been an utter failure.
Obviously, you've only been on the job for a few months, so you can't shoulder too much of the blame for this failure, but my question for you is, how did we get here? How did we get to the point where four years in, the bank has so little to show for itself?