More or less: the government would out-compete the investors and builders, leaving only those with sustainable business practices left to build the difference (I say this part because a healthy business can (ideally) compete on only the merits, as opposed to trying to cheat the market and hiding costs that way as quite a few do now).

There's a whole ton of asterisks here, and we should probably steal a few ideas from Singapore (not everything, because there are things there that don't apply to here, and vice versa), but it's the general idea.

Gov’ts do this very, very badly from anything I’ve seen.

Can you share some details?

I don't personally believe government-run projects are inherently doomed to be bad simply because they're government-run: private industry shits the bed on a fairly regular basis, yet we give it a pass here, so what makes government special here? Both can (and do!) fail in exactly the same ways, and just because it's government or private doesn't mean we shouldn't give it a chance: we've tried the private way for a few decades and look where it got us.

I can see the argument for not having qualified experts available in every municipality and that leading to poor outcomes, but that's a people problem and not a government problem, and also not something unique to government (and the idea that every private industry expert is qualified is absurd: plenty of idiots in private orgs too).

The problem space is the same actual space for both, not a similar space, the exact same. If anything, Canada needs an "Army Corps of Engineers" or something to build infra+housing for municipalities.