Honourable members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, good afternoon. I am pleased to be here with you.
The Canadian Association of Railway Suppliers is the association of companies that make the trains, the rolling stock, freight cars, track maintenance machinery, all the hardware, including some of the noisy stuff that causes the railways a little problem at railway crossings. We're working very hard on improving those products, so bear with us and you'll see the results of our developments in the next few years. Our companies provide things like nuts and bolts, as well as big freight cars, and I'll talk a little bit more about freight cars in a minute.
We believe our industry is on the brink of big expansion because of the growth in the economy and because of the changing fuel costs. Railways, as you may know, are about five times as fuel efficient per tonne moved as road trucks are. And of course movement of freight through railways requires some innovative planning on the part of the railways and innovative planning by our members to come up with the cars and rolling stock that will achieve those gains, albeit with lower freight rates and economies of scale for the size and length of trains.
Government decisions that affect legislation on finance and budgets have a great impact on the rail industry and its ability to provide service to Canadians. Unlike other countries that Canada's producers compete with, particularly on issues like grain transportation, we have to move grain 2,000 kilometres to a port, whereas such competitors as Australia only move it a few hundred kilometres. The United States is a little bit smaller in girth, so again, it's easier for them. We have to be just that much more efficient to help our customers, the railways' customers, compete internationally.
The railway suppliers have about 60,000 employees in Canada. There are about 500 companies altogether, and that group makes a big footprint in Canada's economy. People are familiar with the railways because they see the trains, but if you stop and think about it, what you're looking at is the products of our members.
We want to see the railways invest in cleaner technology, but they need predictable, long-term funding to write off old technology and fund the new technology.
We need to see investment in environmentally sustainable transportation. The railways have come a long way in the last 25 years with greater fuel efficiency of their locomotives, and again, it's our members that have done this work for the railways.
We welcome the renewed Canadian strategic infrastructure fund, and we strongly recommend that the rail infrastructure remain an eligible item under the CSIF program.
We also support the Railway Association of Canada's submission to create a rail technology development fund from the proceeds of fuel tax collected from Canada's railways--about $75 million annually--and that this fund would be accessible to rail technology developers and manufacturers to create a more competitive environment in developing and marketing new technologies, which, in accordance with the last 15 years, do in fact reduce harmful emissions through fuel reductions and cleaner emissions from the locomotives.
We also recommend that investments be made by the federal government for commercialization of research so that innovative technologies can more easily enter the marketplace. An avenue for that has been the Transportation Development Centre, which has been Transport Canada's agency to provide funding for useful and productive research. Our members cooperate with TDC to access that funding, but it really is minimal at the present time. We need to go back to what it was 15, 20, or 25 years ago. One tends to think that these things increase with time, but actually there's one that has unfortunately diminished drastically.