Mr. Speaker, I gave my hon. colleague from Alberta one example of a very poor system, the P3 system. I would like to give him another one called the Joe Howe Building in Halifax. This will not sound true, but it did happen.
Years ago the provincial government under the Conservatives had a building that it owned and it sold it to a real estate company. It leased it from the company for a period of time. When the lease expired, the provincial government was going to leave, but the realtor who owned the building said that if the government left, he would get into serious trouble because of his finances.
The provincial government was going to leave. The assessment on the building dropped. The realtor was going to lose a lot of money. He sold it to another real estate firm. That other real estate firm convinced the then government that it should stick around.
Usually when I rent a place, I pay the rent, but the taxes and all the other things are paid for by the landlord. That is part of what I pay. However, the then provincial government, which was going to leave the building, stuck around and signed a 25 year lease with the new owners of the building it was going to leave.
It did not just pay for the rental of the building. It paid for all the heat, all the maintenance, all the taxes, all the insurance, everything. The provincial Conservative government signed on to all the costs associated with the building.
At the end of the day, the building still does not belong to the taxpayer, and the cost of renting and leasing those things out was phenomenal. It is a huge scandal in Nova Scotia. Conservatives did that. They did it with the schools and now with this program. Then we have our sanitation, which is picked up by a private contractor who has to make a certain profit at the end of the year, which costs the taxpayer even more money.
Those are just three examples that I have given this fine gentleman of the P3 system. What guarantees will he put in place of any P3 system that, first of all, before it goes to that, there will be wide public consultation before that happens? What assurances can he give the House, to the people of Nova Scotia and others, that if the federal government does this--