Transport committee  I have very brief opening remarks, which hopefully the translators will do justice to, given my potentially highly questionable French. Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before your committee today regarding phase 1 of the nationa

Transport committee  On the reasons for the delays, again, we did not specifically request that information from departments and agencies. That said, we have had conversations with provincial governments. We can also point to the historical track record and potential challenges of the federal governm

Transport committee  Ostensibly, there should be matching funding at the very least.

Transport committee  As part of the information request, we did ask for the allocations by the federal government. As well, we received information with respect to the matching funds identified by the provincial governments for those specific types of projects. To your point, we did not actually id

Transport committee  Of course, within the PBO we never comment on policy. It's certainly not within our remit. That said, I will point out that it is a 12-year plan. Something that we've testified to in the past at other committees is that although there might be a challenge up front—as you quite co

Transport committee  It's certainly not for us to make a recommendation with respect to what the committee should study. That said, from a technical perspective, it's a very interesting and important question from our forecasting perspective. Again, the key challenge for us at the outset was trying t

Transport committee  The short answers to your question, because I tend to be grandiloquent occasionally, is yes to one and yes to two. With respect to the delays and the signing of the bilateral agreements, we take do take that into account. With respect to accounting for project delays, and to you

Transport committee  With respect to the delays or the gap between what is announced in a federal budgeting document versus what actually occurs when you look at the public accounts at the federal level around infrastructure spending, it is absolutely not new. This is something that, I think, in our

Transport committee  Going back to the first part of your question, it's not for us to opine upon policy or instrument choice. That said, when you're actually looking at assets that potentially have a lifespan of between 10 and 40 years, that certainty with respect to a funding source is just a basic

Transport committee  As well, I know one of the witnesses you're going to hear from after us, from the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, published work specifically looking at other jurisdictions and the fact that at the national level, they actually have longer-term infrastructure plans. Th

Transport committee  To the crux of your question, with respect to whether there's a plan in place or whether you need to have a plan, I think, if we look at any other federal government program, there's absolutely an internal requirement consistent with government policies to actually have a plan in

Transport committee  We followed up with the infrastructure bank earlier today, and we're still waiting for an explanation from it on the delay in responding to us. I can commit to the committee that, once we do have an explanation on the delay in the response, we can certainly provide an update to t

Transport committee  Very recently we have had an opportunity to have several additional meetings and conversations with the office of Infrastructure Canada. We have received an undertaking and a commitment from the Minister of Infrastructure that they will be furnishing us with more comprehensive in

Transport committee  This is the second time over the past two years, and for us it ends up being very much a function of the interest of the committee and of parliamentarians, as well as the extent to which, from our own fiscal forecasting perspective and our own view of the Canadian economy, the co

Transport committee  It was one that came to us squarely from your counterparts in the Senate at the national finance committee. Their question was about the impact on the federal fiscal plan of federal infrastructure investment from phase one, both in the current term and over the medium term—so ove