Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. If it's okay with you, I thought I would, for a maximum 10 minutes, do a bit of an overview. It is a pleasure to be with you today. I should also tell you that my French is not very good. I thought in my opening remarks that I would say fou

Finance committee  There's a range, and they would include those transit examples you mentioned. I think we see this in a number of cities. Four of the ten most congested cities in North America are in Canada. So I think we need more of that in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver. There would def

Finance committee  Yes, because I think private investors would like there to be a base level of investment with subordinated equity. It would be there to ensure that there is a participant for the long term to help deal with some of the regulatory issues that are in place and that there's a commit

Finance committee  Sure. As I think you were saying, I said at the outset, we're at around a quarter of the level of what we see with peers, and it's dropped. We talked about the challenges with a number of people who invest overseas. First of all, there are multiple groups, so you have multiple p

Finance committee  I think you have to ask Mr. Sabia about that. He's part of the group. Our sense is that there's this big infrastructure gap of at least $500 billion. We don't think the federal government should be trying to provide all the money for it. We should be looking for ways to get priva

Finance committee  I don't think so, sir. I think our hope is that this will allow even more money, if you will, to be put into the system. We do think that federal money is needed—in fact, they call it non-profit generating areas—in low-income housing areas. There's a very big infrastructure defic

Finance committee  That's a great question, by the way. I'm taking notes from what you guys are saying on these things. We have roughly 1,000 officers out there, and our sense is that only about 11 of them are actually focused on what we're talking about here, so there are not enough people doing

Finance committee  Yes, it would.

Finance committee  I'd say a couple of things. First of all, I don't think you'll see too many private equity players investing in long-term infrastructure. The returns are too.... They get nervous after five years, and I think these projects, as you said, are more 30-year events. I don't think you

Finance committee  Can I just make one comment, Mr. Chairman? Is that all right?

Finance committee  I think for us, asset recycling is one element. That's not on the critical path for this. I actually would say that's on the far end of the table. What's key is that there's so much infrastructure that needs to be built now in terms of greenfield—transit systems, ports; a big lis

Finance committee  Thank you. Yes, we have a similar view to yours. This declining workforce worries us, because, again, it's happening so quickly. My personal view is that for Japan it's too late; they've gone beyond the curve. The amount of immigration they would require to do it would be too si

Finance committee  I think one way we could see it working is by, first, having a targeted set of types of companies or investments that we want. For example, I think we would like to have more people—and I'll use Thomson Reuters as a recent example—in the information technology area. It's going to

Finance committee  Yes, we are. We're trying, Mr. Chairman, and you should tell us whether we're doing so adequately. One of the things we've been doing is regional round tables. They've been exactly instructive, as you've said. The first one we did was in eastern Canada, in Halifax. I know that's

Finance committee  We were given a blue sky approach. When Minister Morneau called, I had never met him before. I didn't know him. He basically said, “Your job is to come up with bold ideas that can help jolt growth.” Sometimes we got into things such as “Well, that's an interprovincial issue”, or