Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to attend today's meeting.
I am a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Toronto, and I have been with McKinsey for 28 years. I'm currently the managing partner of McKinsey Canada and responsible for all of our operations across our offices in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Prior to my current role, I was the global leader of McKinsey's infrastructure practice from 2010 to 2019.
On March 29 of this year, I testified before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, which has a broad mandate related to the federal government's use of outside consultants. I'm happy to be back today to address the specific focus of this committee on the Canada Infrastructure Bank.
As I think you all know very well, the Canadian federal government and the taxpayers who fund it have limited financing capacity. It's not fiscally possible for the federal government to provide all the capital necessary in the form of grants to build all the infrastructure our country needs. As such, having an organization like the CIB, whose mandate is to attract private capital into the development of new Canadian infrastructure, was deemed by the government to be necessary to continue to build vital Canadian infrastructure.
The Canada Infrastructure Bank is not a novel idea. There are similar organizations in Australia, the U.K., Europe, Latin America, Asia and many American states. In those jurisdictions, the infrastructure banks have helped develop new infrastructure with private capital.
The Canada Infrastructure Bank was first proposed by the Liberal party in their 2015 election platform, well before McKinsey was involved. The idea of an infrastructure bank was the unanimous recommendation of the 14 members of the growth council, providing advice to the minister of finance in 2016. The high-level concept of the growth council was then taken by the government, which conferred it into legislation that was reviewed, debated, voted on by Parliament and assented to on June 22, 2017.
McKinsey's first engagement with the CIB started more than 18 months after the delivery of the growth council recommendations on infrastructure. We have completed three mandates with the CIB, all awarded through the procurement processes of the CIB.
Our work with the CIB helped in two fundamental areas. First, we reviewed case examples of similar organizations around the world to help translate the enabling legislation into a set of specific operational choices needed for the CIB to accept project proposals. For example, we developed options around such items as stage of project to target, return aspirations, position in the capital structure, risk transfer approaches and the share of capital the bank would consider. These design options were ultimately reviewed and approved by the board of the CIB.
Second, we considered best practices in risk management processes and organization design from other global infrastructure organizations to help design the organization and policies that were essential to the sound operations of a financial organization responsible for managing Canadian taxpayers' funds. We identified 47 different types of risk that the CIB could face and developed structures, systems and processes for managing them. Again, the outcome of our work was approved by the board of the CIB.
Both these efforts were necessary to stand up the CIB at a time when it had limited people to help do so. McKinsey never reviewed nor provided advice on any investment the CIB completed.
As I said in my testimony at OGGO, McKinsey is a proud Canadian company employing over 1,100 people in Canada, and we are also proud of our work helping to launch the CIB. It is an organization that has the potential to help build critical Canadian infrastructure to the benefit of all Canadians.
I look forward to your questions.