I like our crown corporation model here in Canada for huge infrastructure that has to serve millions of citizens across millions of sq km. Crown corps are fully owned by the relevant legislature, created by a specific act, but are shielded from the daily management that government ministries are subject to. They can side step the public servant salary restrictions that often prevent hiring domain exert public servants, but the crown corp remains fully accountable to cabinet and any profits are returned to citizens. It’s a good mixture of the best benefits of public ownership and private enterprise that usually minimizes the worst downsides of both. Most provinces have their electricity generator and provider as a crown corp, but cities often have their own corporation that handles residential grid connections and billing. Certainly not perfect, but it’s been a generally successful model and it’s fairly rare for a crown corporation to need rescuing.

Since Canada is so vast we have a natural risk of monopoly or duopoly for anything involving huge infrastructure buildout like the energy grid or telecommunications. We didn’t learn our lesson well enough with the grid and are really suffering from not having provincial crown corps handling cell networks and internet connectivity.