Transport committee  I think the idea behind the Infrastructure Bank was to make sure that we crowded in capital where it would make sense. Of course if you bring in capital on projects that would otherwise have government funding, that allows you to have government funding in other places. It may or may not have been appropriate for the Infrastructure Bank to be in the places that you're talking about.

Transport committee  I'm happy for you to move on to other questions.

Transport committee  In fact, when I was the minister of finance, I made it my absolute priority not to comment on interest rates. I think I'll continue that this morning.

Transport committee  I don't believe I have ever in my life had a meeting one-on-one with Mr. Pickersgill. I think he was one of the people supporting Dominic Barton at a certain stage in the advisory council deliberations.

Transport committee  I can't answer that question. I don't know.

Transport committee  I had no exposure at all to any commercial meetings with McKinsey during my entire time in office. My only limited exposure would have been through work with the advisory council, and there was no commercial aspect to that interaction.

Transport committee  I had no exposure whatsoever to him or McKinsey in any commercial way, so I have no way of answering that question.

Transport committee  Well, that's a lot. Thank you for the questions. I think the most important response I can make to that is we absolutely saw that the best way for us to make use of government funding was to put it in places where we could amplify that funding by bringing in other sources of capital.

Transport committee  One of the ideas behind the Canada Infrastructure Bank was that we would make investments that would be effective for the long term and that would not crowd out private sector investment. It was not seen from our perspective as something that was going to be inflationary but as something that would be positive for the long-term prosperity of Canada.

Transport committee  I have nothing to respond to that particular point.

Transport committee  I'm not closely linked to the Canada Infrastructure Bank today, so I don't have any way to comment on their current management or governance. When I was the minister of finance, I would have been engaged only from a distance, because it was a separate institution. I can't answer that question with any seriousness.

Transport committee  Again, the risks of the projects would have been less for the government if there were other investors involved, so—

Transport committee  Broadly speaking, the way we were looking at the Infrastructure Bank was to crowd more money into infrastructure, and that—

Transport committee  I'm not aware of how those two decisions were taken other than to say that we would see a project like the REM project as a positive infrastructure project for the country, so that would have made it a good candidate for the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

Transport committee  I was seeking, with the advisory council, to get expertise from people who weren't in politics and who weren't necessarily in government but who would bring us the kinds of ideas that could help us to change a trajectory of growth that we saw as problematic. We wanted to make sure that we didn't have any exclusions in terms of ideas.