Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the minister for appearing today.
I want to commend the minister for the recent announcement in Windsor with respect to the Windsor-Essex Parkway proposal from DRIC. I want to commend him for reiterating the federal government's important funding commitment to that project. The initial down payment of $400 million, and a commitment to up to 50% of the eligible capital costs for, essentially, the extension of a provincial highway, is critical to an end-to-end solution for new capacity at that corridor. It's the single most important piece of infrastructure in Canada, in my opinion, and our commitment represents the largest infrastructure investment in a single project since World War II, if I'm not mistaken. That's going to help transform our economy.
Having said that, I want to shift to one of the more significant areas this committee has dealt with, and that's railway safety. You've indicated that your initial reaction to the report was positive. Building on your initial reaction to the report, this report has 56 recommendations. That's an awful lot of recommendations. My concern is that with so many recommendations, we could wind up engaging in an exercise of checklisting by bureaucrats, without an awful lot of focus.
I want to bring the question back to the issue of our focus in moving forward with that report. My understanding of the heart of that railway safety report—and I think it was somewhere around page 73 or 74 of the report—was in getting to stage five of the evaluation tool, which is full implementation of SMS both for the rail industry and the regulator, Transport Canada. Achieving that would put us in a position of having the highest possible safety in the rail sector. Mr. Lewis agreed with that, when I questioned him.
Mr. Minister, of all those recommendations put forward by the panel, what do you think is the most important? What's the most important focus to come out of this report, so that we can actually get some things achieved? You can't serve two masters, and you certainly can't serve 56 masters. Where do you see the focus of this report going for Transport Canada?