Sir, that's a huge question, but to a degree, yes. I have seen transfer of European technology to Canada and I've seen it in the other direction. This has been going on since the beginning of railways on both continents. On the other hand, there are cultural barriers that slow down the transfer. For example, Transport 2000 was shocked and amazed to see that the City of Ottawa would build on its railway a superhighway type anti-noise wall, which any engineer experienced in railways could have told them would have been ineffective, and it was.
The answer is, there is transfer of technologies, but it's a bit slow. Everybody reads the same journals. We all read Railway Gazette International, International Rail Journal, and Railway Age, and people know this stuff if they read that. They don't all, but most do. But then getting permission to bring in this new and strange thing can cause headaches.
For example, there were people in Transport Canada who didn't want European couplers to be used on the O-Train. Unfortunately, if you didn't use those couplers you couldn't run them in a multiple unit. There was a fellow in Mr. Collenette's office who phoned up and raised a little hell and the Scharfenberg couplers were retained.
There is an anti-European bias in the railway culture here, just as there's an anti-North American bias in the railway culture in some countries in Europe. That is a barrier to technical transfer in a timely manner.