"Commodities go up and down," Danyluk says. "And if you look at infrastructure, if you try to go up and down and build when the mood is high and the profits are there, what ends up happening is, when there is no funding, you're not building."
"So this province and this government feel it is extremely important to be stable," he adds.
Part of that stability comes from a $17 billion so-called Sustainability Fund set up by Premier Ed Stelmach in 2006. The fund, seeded with the province's share of oil and gas revenues, helps Alberta plan its capital needs 20 years into the future with the knowledge that it will have the cash on hand to support the investment.
"It's like a savings account," Danyluk says.
For PPP investors, who often worry about appropriation risk, or the possibility that the government they're working with won't honor future payments, that's a major selling point.
"As a financing party, you always look at the credit rating of your counterpart, which, for the province, is AAA," explains Stefan Parche, president of North American operations at PPP investor Amber Infrastructure. "It's a really, really good counterparty to work with."
Another key reason for Alberta's embrace of PPPs is simply the scale of the ambition in infrastructure. It's the various ministries, such as Education in the case of schools, that propose the projects to Alberta's Treasury Board. Alberta Infrastructure then does the research to determine whether a PPP would be an appropriate delivery mechanism - its mandate expanded into PPPs in 2003. If PPP is the right approach, and the Board approves the funding, then work gets under way, with one guiding principle in mind: "the Premier has a commitment to the most advanced infrastructure in North America," Danyluk says. "It is infrastructure that works for the people who use the facilities, work in the facilities."