Parliament’s budget watchdog says a federal infrastructure financing agency has yet to meet a key aspect of its mandate: pulling in private dollars for major projects.
The Trudeau Liberals created the infrastructure agency in 2017 to address that gap by using $35 billion in federal financing to pull in two or three times that in private dollars.
Parliamentary budget officer Yves Giroux writes in a report today that the Canada Infrastructure Bank has committed just over $4 billion for projects, but none involve funding from private investors.
Instead, the money from the bank is coming from other public-sector entities like municipal and provincial governments, as well as the Quebec pension plan.
Nor is it clear that private dollars are involved in any of the remaining 13 projects in which the agency is participating, Giroux writes.
The PBO report says eight of the 13 projects have yet to announce a financial commitment and are currently under either a memorandum of understanding, in a project acceleration phase or receiving advisory services.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 23, 2021
