Transport committee  Sure.

Transport committee  By and large, yes.

Transport committee  To my knowledge the only other province that has a gas tax program is Quebec. I know about Ontario and Quebec.

Transport committee  Alberta has a kind of transfer, but it's not tied to the gas tax.

Transport committee  The gas tax, as you know, has two components that are unique. The first is that the federal share is 100%. The second unique component is that the federal government has no role in project selection. Those two things would tend by their nature, especially the second, to not highl

Transport committee  I wouldn't necessarily call them “land mines”, but I would call your attention to some things that will come up as issues and things that this committee and others will need to explore in the context of the study of public transit. I think, for me, the first would be the questi

Transport committee  I don't have a position per se--

Transport committee  Yes. I've been explaining what the government has been doing in public transit over the last decade. I think it's very important to note that the government in the last budget, as I talked about briefly in my opening remarks, has announced this process to undertake a long-term co

Transport committee  That depends on your definition of “strategy”. I think you might be better off asking CUTA that question, since they studied the matter in detail. Personally, I did look somewhat into the public transit approaches taken by the G8 countries. Actually, Canada has many of the eleme

Transport committee  CUTA has put together a national policy framework that sets outs the components of a strategy, and Canada already has a number of those components. Through the chair, I can give you the document indicating that Canada has components of a national strategy, basically putting it o

Transport committee  With Toronto, as I mentioned, its cost recovery tends to be in the high 80s, I believe. So when Toronto builds the Toronto-York Spadina subway extension, if that follows the pattern of the rest of its system, Toronto will be subsidizing about 15% of the cost of that operating ser

Transport committee  Municipalities have to provide one third of the money, and the Government of Canada is not at all interested in meddling in municipal matters.

Transport committee  The greatest single issue that ties all of those things together is population density. In Canada we have probably six or seven major metropolitan centres with population densities that approach European population densities. In turn, those are the communities where you tend to f

Transport committee  Exactly.

Transport committee  Well, the federal government approves all projects, so yes, all projects go through an assessment and a review process. But generally speaking, we don't see a lot of overbuilding, because one of the things we try to do is ensure that all of our projects are cost-shared. To the