Again, when the current federal government, back in the election period in 2015, floated the idea of the public infrastructure bank, the vision at that point and the stated intention was that the mandate of the bank would be to provide low-cost loans to local governments to finance new public infrastructure and strengthen their communities. That's what was originally proposed back in the platform of the government in 2015.
Again, with the involvement of McKinsey and BlackRock, there was this shift to focus on trying to attract private capital. There was this “pie in the sky” promise that there would be a 5:1 ratio of private dollars coming in to assist with that. We've seen, over the five years, that this has not been the case. In fact, the bank has been struggling to maintain even a 1:1 ratio of public-to-private dollars.
The result of that is that municipalities, as we heard, some of them are being declined for the projects they're applying for, which again is very necessary infrastructure. We all live in places where we know the roads are aging, and all the pipes and underground infrastructure that we can't see needs repair. If projects are not being accepted because they don't have that requisite private partner, that's a problem. Again, even having a private partner, we've seen in different municipalities the issues that can go along with that. Mapleton's a big example of that. There are several others throughout the country.
Again, the main purpose of a public bank is that they have a very public focus. The ones that have been successful, which we see primarily over in Europe but certainly in other countries and continents, do have that. Their guarantees are backed by the municipalities or the countries that are signatories to those public banks. That ensures the funding is flowing directly to the municipalities, to the communities, to those public projects that really need to be financed, without having to go through the hoops of having private investment involved. Then again, CUPE is always concerned, as we should be, about the threat of increased privatization of public services.
Transit's an interesting one. It's great that there's funding coming in to help make transit more sustainable in terms of being environmentally sustainable. Transit systems in North America in particular don't make money. They're never going to make money. They're an essential service that municipalities are bound to provide. Again, if we bring private capital that has an interest in making money into something like transit, they're not going to make money on that. The end result is going to be higher user fees and what we've seen in other cities: cutting hours and cutting the services that people rely on.