Finance committee  I'm not an economist, but I would agree. I've read the report. I do agree with the analysis. Given the low interest rates and given the fact that the economy in Canada is not performing up to capacity, this is the perfect time to leverage infrastructure as one of the best uses of

Finance committee  I don't know exactly the answer to that, to be honest with you. I would have to do some more research on—

Finance committee  A large amount of that money was certainly borrowed and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The IMF released a report this month basically saying that advanced economies have a golden opportunity right now, with interest rates at historic lows and an economic slack fairly signifi

Finance committee  With a lot of the infrastructure funding, governments can lock in rates for a longer term, so I don't think that would be a significant issue.

Finance committee  No. I think the intention of asset recycling is you take the funds from the disposition of legacy assets and put them toward new assets. It's explicitly not intended to pay down deficit or debt.

Finance committee  I would.

Finance committee  Sure. Adequate referred to the level of funding. As I mentioned, in Ontario about 12% of infrastructure investments come from the federal government. The other 88% come from the Ontario government and local governments. That's adequate. In terms of being aligned, I think that wi

Finance committee  I don't know for a fact. It would be roughly comparable. There may be some variations, but it would be in the same order of magnitude.

Finance committee  We have looked on Infrastructure Canada's website. This was a $1-billion program from 2009 to 2014, and essentially about $150 million was just unexplained. It's not clear what that money has been used for or whether it has been used, whereas other money from that fund has been d

Finance committee  I think one of the ways to fix that is to look at the federal requirements for matching funds and the deadlines for those matching funds, because I think in a number of cases we've seen municipalities and/or provinces being forced to quickly come up with funding to match a federa

Finance committee  From our perspective, not really. It doesn't really make sense that P.E.I. and Ontario get exactly the same amount of money for a significant portion of a fund, when they obviously have massively different populations and needs.

Finance committee  I wouldn't characterize it as anything, but I think others can characterize it the way they want. Yes, we had a hard time finding a public policy rationale for that.

Finance committee  From our perspective, asset recycling is one of those tools that hasn't been explored very much in Canada. For those who aren't aware of what it is, essentially it's a case where governments will dispose of old assets that aren't fulfilling their original public policy purpose.

Finance committee  Yes, and essentially take the proceeds from the disposition of that asset and then put it toward the construction of a new asset that might be more in keeping with the needs of the country at the current time. I don't really think there is an issue in terms of our federal syste

Finance committee  I can answer that briefly, and then perhaps Mr. Roschlau may want to chime in. There are huge pools of capital that we're not really tapping into, so the first real issue is that the federal government needs to bring the pension funds to the table and talk to them about some of