Government Operations committee  Yes, I can. Thank you.

Government Operations committee  Thank you. The P3 module has been under-researched in Canada, and the large profits that are being made on them by large construction companies, finance houses, and consultants and the ideological commitment to P3s by various levels of government mean that the Canadian public fi

Government Operations committee  Yes, we are in a sense talking very directly about contract evaluations. I think the key is to ask a number of questions. One, is risk actually being transferred? There's a lot of skepticism about that in the literature. Two, at what cost is this risk being transferred? Three,

Government Operations committee  Go ahead.

Government Operations committee  The writing of contracts is quite difficult. Obviously we've gained a lot of experience over the last 15 years in the writing of P3 contracts. We still, I believe, make some huge mistakes, and we have done so recently in Canada on P3 contracts. The question is whether you can eve

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I would only add that one only obtains cost certainty and maintenance certainty in P3 contracts by paying for it. Often, the upfront costs that are concluded are arrived at in several different stages, so a lot of these contingencies that we're saying the private sect

Government Operations committee  Can you hear me?

Government Operations committee  I have addressed that question in a publication which came out earlier this year. The point to stress is that you're not getting extra finance from P3s. You're paying more, possibly, for them. The issue is there is a real infrastructure deficit at all levels of government. I th

Government Operations committee  Thank you, John. It's good to see you again. It's my feeling that risk analysis should be made available publicly, and the details of the projects that go into risk analysis should be made available. If you talk to small contractors, they would argue they come in on time, they

Government Operations committee  It would be fair to say that a lot more thought goes into P3s than there used to be and that the contracts are probably better, in many cases, but that's not always the case. My big fear is the huge concern in hospitals in the U.K. about the unitary charge or the lease payments t

Government Operations committee  I've looked at design-build, but perhaps not in as much detail as I should. Design-build is quite controversial. Architects and engineers don't like it. They think it gives far too much influence to contractors. They worry about the quality of the product because—and this appli

Government Operations committee  Well, what I would say is that the distinction between clinical and non-clinical services in hospitals is in many ways an artificial one, and that the quality of maintenance, cleaning, food, and so on is intimately related to the clinical side of hospitals. There has been a lot o

Government Operations committee  I think there is an issue of the life of the projects versus the political life and bureaucratic life of institutions. It's even worse than that in Winnipeg. I think most city councillors would argue that they had not seen the details of these projects before they'd been implemen

Human Resources committee  Thank you very much. I'm at a slight disadvantage in that I'm not fully aware of what you've covered in past hearings, but I will try to build on what I've heard. My interest is in social impact bonds and their rationale. I think the appeal of social impact bonds is fairly strai

Human Resources committee  I think that in the early stages of social impact bonds, governments will be reluctant to see them fail. We've seen this in different parts of the world. There are guarantees in some cases, but not in all. But I think the model has so much backing in places like the United Kingdo