Finance committee  You can think of bankruptcy as a project failure, but the other way to think of it is as a successful risk transfer to the private sector. If all our P3 projects made an attractive return, that would mean that we are overpaying for the transfer of risk, so a bankruptcy may actual

Finance committee  That's the million-dollar question. Does it need to be done in the legislation? Do you need to reform the legislation, or are these the kinds of institutional safeguards that you can create in the actual practice of the bank? A good example of where this isn't necessarily baked

Finance committee  I would say first of all that you're about to hear from Matti Siemiatycki and Mark Romoff. Matti will give you all the answers you could possibly want on P3 performance. Sorry, Matti, I'm putting you on the spot. The problem with the basis of an infrastructure gap is compared to

Finance committee  That's the very fundamental basis of how most governments have defined infrastructure gaps. Getting a bank that's receiving unsolicited proposals is a start, where you can start gaining private sector ingenuity to say, “There's a need here. We can provide this on a user-fee basi

Finance committee  A long-term equity stake, as proposed in the original framing back in the fall 2016 economic statement, is exactly along the lines we were talking about, a long-term operate-and-maintain role for institutional investors. I very much see the idea of this infrastructure bank to get

Finance committee  Via Rail expansion to higher-speed rail between, for example, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.

Finance committee  I just spent $2 billion.

Finance committee  I would say first that I'm an economist, not a legislative drafter. The question becomes this: how many of these institutional details have to be baked right into the legislation as opposed to what can come afterwards? That's a question that Parliament and this committee will hav

Finance committee  A quick question on the Herb Gray Parkway is who ended up paying for that mistake. Very quickly on user fees, the lack of user fees in Canada is why we can't have nice things. When it comes to the lack of transit in Canada, and congestion on our highways, we need to be able to h

Finance committee  Right now, the legislation has the broad strokes right. The real issue now becomes governance issues that need to be addressed. Should these governance issues be enshrined in the legislation—and there, it's pretty hard-coded in, so that will be hard to change in the future—or do

Finance committee  I think that's correct. We have not in Canada moved our P3 model so far as to really take into account that demand risk. Most P3 projects in Canada, historical P3 projects, were starting to move a little bit more in this direction. Governments and taxpayers, by definition, are on

Finance committee  When it comes to the importance of private investment, it can't be emphasized enough that the public debate here misses the really core benefit, which is that transfer of risk. In Canada, when we have public procurement entirely led by the public sector and we have projects like

Finance committee  Thank you very much. My name is Benjamin Dachis. I'm associate director of research at the C.D. Howe Institute. We're a national non-partisan public policy think tank. I'll be summarizing some of my recently published research that's available on the C.D. Howe Institute websit

Government Operations committee  What I'm recommending is in fact a continuation of Canada Post's existing model. When you go to a Shoppers Drug Mart, the kind of retail outlet that has—

Government Operations committee  That I can't confirm, but the bottom line is that if we want to address social issues, say, the question then becomes—this is going back to your point about how we want to view Canada—what's the best way of dealing with the specific issue you have in mind? Are the postal rates th