Thank you for that.
Indeed, Canadians will be making this decision in the interests of the generations that follow us. There will be people sitting in the seats we all occupy right now. I hope you're one of them in a couple of decades who will thank us for doing this work.
This is an avant-garde project, but more importantly it shows the world that Canada can still contemplate, decide and complete big things like the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Confederation Bridge that I know Mr. MacDonald knows very well.
Remember that, faced with threats from south of our border, Canada decided to build an east-west railway across the great expanses of the Prairies and the Rocky Mountains, and did so in four years. I'm not sure that some of the methods used in those days would be appropriate in the current era, but it is the spirit of accomplishment of the CPR that I think ought to inspire us.
In terms of the more tangible benefits, we're taking cars off the road. We're allowing smaller cities like Trois-Rivières and Peterborough to imagine a new kind of economic future. We're allowing students, residents, travellers, tourists and business people to imagine a much reduced and much easier travel time between some of our great economic centres in this country.
This is an incredible thing. It would be the first such infrastructure on North American soil, and what a hopeful, ambitious and incredible message for Canada to send to have brand new high-speed electric cars come into some of our greatest cities and be able to come and go with a frequency and accessibility that would allow anyone to board them and use them to conduct their affairs and live their lives on a daily basis.