Under the P3 model, the legal title to the underlying asset is held by the private sector until the end of the term of the concession and then it reverts to the public sector, explained Michael Watts, a partner in Osler's Toronto office and Chair of the firm's National Health Industry Group.

Under IO's AFP model, legal title to the underlying asset is not conveyed to the private sector, he said, but the benefits of the P3 approach, namely integrating a project's design, build, finance and maintenance components, the allocation of risk, together with a disciplined procurement and deployment approach is maintained to achieve better value for money.

AFP is familiar to the bricks-and-mortar community and has been adapted to IT in other jurisdictions, particularly in the U.K. But it remains relatively new to the IT industry in Ontario.

"What we have done is adopted both what we've done here for infrastructure, but also what they've done for IT and used their lessons to apply a new form, a derivative form, of that," said Renato Discenza, senior vice-president of IT Project Delivery for Infrastructure Ontario.

"We want to use the principles of using private sector resources to do public works, but we want to actually make sure it's IT-friendly, so that's my job -- to take the principles and turn it into something that IT firms and IT companies can actually use and deploy," said Discenza.