Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to the member opposite who talked about this proposed idea to think about what an infrastructure bank might look like. I would like to hear his comments on some ideas that we have pursued, certainly I did as a city councillor in Toronto, around public-private partnerships, around the rehabilitation and delivery of public housing to people in need.
One of the partnerships we established was between hotel workers and their pension fund, a housing program, and a private developer to deliver a co-op with 45 units of housing. We have additionally worked with pension funds to revitalize neighbourhoods, to deliver almost 800 units of housing, including employment programs for young people to get into the skilled trades and enrol them in good unionized jobs as part of the process.
Would the member opposite not acknowledge that using pension funds to extend infrastructure spends, rather than replace, sometimes provides us with the additional capacity to deliver not only more social programs and more capacity in our social programs but also jobs, by using pension funds to hire people rather than simply just making investments?
Could he not see a possibility that the House would recognize that engaging pension funds to extend the infrastructure spend might actually get more infrastructure built rather than less?