Thank you, Mr. Masse.
It's a perspicacious question and certainly it's the first thing that comes up when folks think about Sidewalk Labs and that boondoggle and everything that unfolded from that.
When we talk about data analytics and the transit and transportation world, whether it's bus, coach or truck, we're really talking about impersonal analytics of the machine. It's putting the loggers on the machine, the bus, the coach or the truck to determine how many units—how many kilometres—it is going per unit of energy. What is its efficiency on the powertrain? Is the motor performing at the efficiency level that the operator expects?
We put loggers on the chargers to know exactly how many electrons are coming from the grid and making their way through to the battery pack and being lost on the way. All of that adds up to dollars and those dollars add up to millions of lost dollars when you're talking about a complex transition to this kind of energy system.
Personal data is a non-issue right now because the data analytics we're talking about are analyzing the bus, the charger, the energy storage device, the fuel cell stack, the hydrogen electrolyzer—the energy systems or the inanimate objects that perform the actual propulsion.
Is it possible that, over time, in the creation of such a data trust, one could identify opportunities in obtaining the consent of riders in order to also track them? In the interest of transit, yes, it is a hypothetical possibility. If a data trust led by transit and communities were set up in the future, there would potentially be merit in asking Canadian riders if they would consent to having their data tracked. The primary reason for doing that would be to hand back benefits to transit riders in the sense that where you ride, how you ride and the time you ride should give you some reward or price deduction on your transit ride. That's an issue for a few years from now.
The big issue right now is the performance of the energy systems.