Finance committee  Well, I don't think that wages are tax exempt, sir. This act--

Finance committee  We're talking about what elements of the employment remuneration, either in cash or in kind, are taxable. Right now this type of benefit would be fully taxable, because in a sense an employer would be giving an employee either cash towards their transit fare or a voucher that wou

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  That's right, and it would be taxed as cash income at the margin of the individual's tax bracket. You're quite right that this goes back to Nelson Riis' motion about 12 or 15 years ago, and there have been several others in the meantime. I think there was one from the Bloc at on

Finance committee  The only experience we have is from other countries, obviously, but again, one of the beauties of this measure is that its cost is directly proportional to the uptake. So if it doesn't work, if nobody is taking you up on it, it doesn't cost the government anything. We've done so

Finance committee  It has been very good at rewarding people for their existing behaviour, and the transit users who are taking advantage of it are getting, in a sense, a de facto break on their fares after the fact when they claim their tax credit, which is great. But it's important to see it as t

Finance committee  --and who you want to reward.

Finance committee  Exactly.

Finance committee  Yes, we are talking about an integrated approach. The money is an important part of it and the fact that the money be dedicated is an important part of it. But there are lots of other pieces. There's an R and D piece that is really important. There's the whole linkage between inv

Finance committee  Thank you very much. That's an excellent question, because there's a lot of confusion about this issue. What we're proposing is a tax exemption for employer-provided transit benefits, which is very different from the tax credit that's currently in place. Let me explain. Right

Finance committee  The beauty of this is that it's targeted to the journey to work. Its success is entirely correlated with the extent to which it's promoted, which is very different from the tax credit that's currently in place.

Finance committee  On the tax credit side of it, we don't. It's been very hard to make any direct link between the implementation of the tax credit and the ridership increase.

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for inviting us to make a presentation. My name is Michael Roschlau. I am the president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Association. I'd like to talk today about the state of federal transit investment in Canada. Over the past several years

Transport committee  That is not really my area of expertise, but if you consider how things are elsewhere — in France, Germany or Spain, for example — there rarely are stops where fewer than 200,000 or 300,000 inhabitants can effectively access a station.

Transport committee  For a high speed train to be effective and financially viable, there cannot be too many stops. With speeds reaching 200, 300 or 400 kilometres an hour, such a train cannot stop at every station. Stops can only be located in areas with significant demand. There would likely be one