Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Picking up on my colleague's commentary, for members of the public watching this meeting and listening to the testimony, I think it paints a certain picture. You have Dominic Barton, the managing director of McKinsey, who is intimately involved in the conception of the bank. The bank then hires his company to stand up the bank, and now we have a meeting with three of the five witnesses before us who were former McKinsey employees. It doesn't take much to see a certain picture there.
I want to take us down a different path.
In April 2001, the CIB signed an agreement in principle to invest $655 million in the Lake Erie Connector project, an underground transmission line that was going to deliver power from Ontario to Pennsylvania. ITC, the proponent of the project, is a massive company. In 2022, I think, it had $48 billion in assets. It's about twice the size of the Infrastructure Bank.
Why did a company this big need the bank's help in getting this project to go, Mr. Cory?