Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank all the witnesses here.
We're talking about railway as infrastructure, and in general, infrastructure is very important in Kitchener—Conestoga, specifically roads and bridges.
We mentioned infrastructure that's not used much. Railway crossings are not used much. Roads and bridges are not used often. That's important because I have a Mennonite community using horses and buggies. When we're talking about a bridge or road that needs to be closed and people have to drive a few minutes down the road, our Mennonite community has extra challenges doing that.
I appreciate this conversation. We're trying to balance safety with practicality. I want to point out that we're talking about private railway crossings, not public crossings, and that these crossings are used by the farmers themselves and not that often.
I'll direct my questions to Mr. Spoelstra from OFA.
You mentioned the costs that could be passed down to farmers—$600,000 to $2 million per farm—if we don't find cost-effective measures to do this. Farmers can't afford a bill like that. That's going to cost them money or, if they have to go around, would cost them time, which is also money. In my region, Waterloo, there are 15 private and farm crossings on the CN line and 12 on the CP line, and we even have nine on a smaller Elmira line, so this absolutely affects us in the Waterloo region.
Can you explain how we can make the railways pay for these changes or how we can change the process of how a train passes through private lands? What kind of mechanisms can we enforce?