I think we've talked at previous iterations of this committee about this central idea, which is that we have an infrastructure deficit in this country. Most analysis pegs it at several hundred billion dollars and numbers that are hard to actually wrap your head around. I think if we want to grow our economy, to continue to decarbonize our economy and to grow effectively, then we need to make massive investments in infrastructure. The simple reality is that we can't afford to do all of that the way we have historically done it, and that is on the basis of public taxpayer money only.
The point of a program like the CIB is to stretch taxpayer dollars further by making a loan with concessionary terms, as is the case with this loan. What we're trying to do is make more infrastructure projects happen. Over the life of the loan, when we get paid back the interest over time, we will get back our $1 billion plus the interest compounded over many years. That means that at the end of the loan, there is not a cost to taxpayers. There's a capital cost, if you think of expense versus capital. We're lending $1 billion, but we're getting that money back with interest. The job of the CIB is to make loans that the rest of the market can't, because either they have lower interest rates and/or they take more risk.
Many projects face challenges of cost. The BC Ferries purchase would be a great example. Many projects face challenges of risk. With EV charging networks across this country or with decarbonizing buildings, many of these are very risky. With carbon capture and storage in our oil sands, if we want to clean our energy sources, all of these things come with a lot of market risk. Critical minerals extraction is another.
The CIB might also make a loan where we're taking above-market risk. It's not always about low-cost money; sometimes it's about higher risk. Either way, our job is to make those loans, and across the portfolio of them, to charge enough interest that we cover all of our operating costs and the risk we're taking, because some loans will not pan out perfectly. That's the point of loans; there's some risk of default. When I say, “take risk”, that means some of the risk will come home to roost.
However, over the portfolio, if we charge enough interest, the idea is that this should cost taxpayers nothing, or be minimal, and should launch many projects across the country.