Transport Committee on May 14th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

He may, if he can be very brief.

[Paul Langan]

It's common technology in the rest of the world. The two never meet.

You usually go above ground. Germany sometimes has level crossings. But this is not new; we're talking of 28 years now in France, and a 100% safety record. This is old news. Siemens just did Moscow-Petersburg, again entirely grade-separated, with no chance of auto meeting train. That is the common way it's been done for decades. It's nothing new. We have the experts at Bombardier, at Alstom, at Siemens, all in this country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

That's good timing.

Mr. Dhaliwal.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome to the panel.

Mr. Langan, you touched on Obama's vision of this Seattle to Vancouver corridor. It hits me like home, when I talk about metro Vancouver. I personally understand that the high-speed railways help the tourism industry, particularly in tough times when this Conservative government has taken the GST rebate away from the visitors, which has hit the tourism industry negatively.

Last week the people from Transport Canada were here. They haven't even looked at the proposal for the small portion between the border and Vancouver. What role do you feel Canada should play? What kind of role should the government play?

[Paul Langan]

First of all, I'm not here to praise the American president, but his vision on passenger rail.... When people like me, who like passenger rail—we're passionate and we like high-speed rail—heard his speech, it was on our website about six seconds later.

To answer your question specifically on the Vancouver--Seattle corridor, I was on a couple of radio shows last week, and we talked about it; I debated it. One fellow was saying we need more buses. You know that darn road is not going to be solved by adding congestion, by putting more buses on. They've been doing that for 30 years.

Amtrak has a plan. It has a detailed plan for improving this corridor—

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

But Canada's role...?

[Paul Langan]

—and on the other side of the border, they are making some improvements. There has been money put forward to put in another track for customs, so that they're not with freight in Vancouver.

I think what we need to do, though, is raise the profile. I've been asked to come with our organization to Vancouver to educate people, to say that this is a viable option. That's a perfect example, just as Windsor is—and I know, Jeff, that you're from Essex, and I'm from Windsor—of how we have this jammed border.

Why aren't we moving people with rail also? It's a slam dunk. The president was right on the money.

Again, we're not talking about 300 kilometres an hour, but maybe 150 kilometres an hour. We're going to have more than one train a day.

The answer in your area is simple, but we need to get the powers to be together, all levels of government. It's a little trickier there, because you're dealing with the United States, Canada, customs on both sides, so it makes it tougher. But get them together. The plan is there; we have to move it forward.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

On the other angle, Mr. Mackay, you touched on the public-private partnership. If I look at the Port Mann Bridge very close to where my riding is, public-private partnership has fallen apart. What is the specific role that you see private enterprise playing in this high-speed railway?

[Cliff Mackay]

On the private side of a public-private partnership in high speed, the private side should be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the system and for all things related thereto. I think they could share in the responsibility of the financing of the system. I think the government needs to be responsible for the assembly of the corridor, either directly or indirectly through whatever means it feels is appropriate. It needs to put in place the right institutional structure. I mentioned things like making sure you don't allow a lot of competition in the early days particularly, so you can see a revenue stream coming out of this, as we've done with airports. It probably needs to be the senior partner in the upfront financing of the initial infrastructure.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

When we travel to Europe we see higher densities that support the high-speed railways compared to Canada. Can you justify that a high-speed railway is viable in Canada with its lower densities?

[Cliff Mackay]

I'm going to ask Mr. Langan to answer that question too. I think the short answer, particularly in the two high-speed corridors that are being talked about, is that the studies would justify the investment. Particularly if you compare it as it was earlier to the amount of money we're plowing into highways anyway, it's not a difficult sell.

[Paul Langan]

That is the number one thing I try to clear up about high-speed rail when I travel the country. We have way more than enough population to support high-speed rail. That is an argument that road engineering consultants used for 20 years in Canada to say why we shouldn't have one. We have way more than they have between Madrid and Barcelona. It's not an issue. We have the people. It's a good question, though.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Monsieur Roy.

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My question may be for both Mr. Mackay and you at the same time, Mr. Langan, because, in the presentation you gave us, you said that 40% of the passengers in high speed trains will be former motorists. That means that you will be looking for 60% of your passengers from elsewhere, whether it be from airlines, buses, or the present rail system. You know that transportation has been deregulated since about 1983 or 1984.

Mr. Mackay, you mentioned the fixation on the deficit. There was a fixation on the deficit and on deregulation. You see it in Air Canada, in VIA Rail, everywhere. What it means for us in the regions is a ever-greater reduction in service. That is what it has meant for us.

If I look at Air Canada's current situation, a company constantly on the brink of bankruptcy, I say to myself that, if you go and get 20% of its customers, you will ground it.

I do not want to be the devil's advocate, because I absolutely support the implementation of high speed rail service. I have already been fighting for intermodal transportation at home, for coastal service along the St. Lawrence. We are not there yet. It is practically impossible to bring all the players together, VIA Rail, the trucking companies and the shipping companies, because they are private companies, because there is no political will, and because the government will never force private companies to sit down together.

You tell us that the government should be investing in HSR. If the government did that, the first to scream would be Air Canada and the bus companies, telling you that the government has no business supporting one form of transportation when it no longer supports already existing ones. That is the problem we are going to have.

How would you go about solving that? If the government invested in Air Canada tomorrow morning, VIA Rail would scream blue murder. Am I right? It is as simple as that. The bus companies would do the same thing. That is the problem. Since the deregulation in the mid-1980s, the government hardly has any clout any more, except in regulating safety. It has practically no connection with transportation left.

[Cliff Mackay]

I would make a few observations here.

You're right about deregulation. The ability of government to directly control everything has been reduced, and the marketplace is now much more dominant than it was back in the sixties and seventies.

Having said that, one of the things that I think government still has significant influence over is setting the broad conditions within which all of these private sector players play. One of the things we have not been able to do—and I think this is a challenge for government in the next few years—is make sure that this framework leads to the optimization of the various modes, so that the various modes of transport, whether they're freight or passenger, are playing their most efficient role in the overall system.

One of the prices we're paying because we haven't been able to do this is the massive increase in greenhouse gases because we are not using the right modes to do the right things in the system. We're contributing much more greenhouse gas to the system than we should be.

Through the combination of an environmental policy and policies that are unfolding now, such as gateway policies, concerning which I would argue that the government's leadership on the west coast has made a significant difference—it's certainly not perfect, but it has made a significant difference, and people are now being more rational, in their modal choices out there, than they were in the past—there are ways to move in that direction.

You mentioned air specifically. You're absolutely right: if there were a high-speed rail system between Montreal and Toronto, it is highly likely that people would opt for that service rather than take a cab out to Pearson and fly to Dorval, then take a cab from Dorval to wherever they're going. But that's not Air Canada's long-term future. I'm not a spokesperson for Air Canada, but when I look at the kinds of airplanes they own and the kinds of networks they have around the world, their long-term future is long-haul international or North American air service.

Now, for Porter Airways it's a different matter, and Jazz, in those particular markets, could very well be hurt from a business point of view; I don't argue the point. But in the broader public policy context, companies have to adjust to the reality of the competition they face. And they will adjust. I don't see Canada's bus companies going out of business because of high-speed rail. They will have to serve the nodes, down to wherever you can connect into that system, from all over small-town Canada, in the areas where these kinds of services are going to be available.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

I'm sorry about the time; we're well past again.

Mr. Watson.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses.

That is the direction I was going to go in: the consequences for the other modes of travel. The airline industry, many will suggest, is having a difficult go of it. I think one of the effects of moving in this direction would be the change in preference between modes.

I want to make sure we're comparing apples to apples when we consider feasibility. I'm just thinking of some rough numbers. The population of Europe is estimated this year to be 830 million. We're about 35 million. Greater London is 7.5 million, and England is 51 million. Greater Paris is 11.2 million and France 62 million. Madrid is 5.2 million, Spain 40 million. It almost seems like a no-brainer that there would be a strong case not only for the constructability of rail, but for the ongoing operational cost of passenger rail.

If we were to be honest around the table, I don't think there's a lack of desire on the constructability side of it. The question, I think, for feasibility is on the operational side, particularly down in the city of Windsor. Greater Windsor is 350,000 people. I can't even get an on-demand stop from VIA in Belle River, and I've been trying for years for it.

If we're looking at constructing a high-speed rail corridor, are we not, at least essentially in the early stages, talking about the area between Toronto and Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal—somewhere in that triangle? I say that also to suggest, in terms of our latest budgetary moves with respect to trying to bring down the time travel in that particular corridor, that there's probably some sensibility about why we're doing that. There is a case to be made for it there, at least initially.

Do you have any comments on that?

[Paul Langan]

Well, I don't want to ramble. We're non-partisan. I want to make sure that we're very clear about that. We're not Liberal, Bloc, or NDP. When we talk about the--

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Just to be fair, you didn't mention Conservative.

[Paul Langan]

Yes, but Freud is dead.

I want to put things in perspective. When they announced the money for VIA for that third line to cut down the times, that was a positive thing. But I want to put it into perspective for you to show how bad things are.

They said that they were going to cut a half-hour off their time, and it is now going to be four hours to get from Toronto to Montreal. That is a good thing. But that is the same schedule we had in 1975. That's how bad things are. To everybody here, that's how far we have to improve. Yes, that was a good thing moving forward, but look at how much further we have to go to raise the bar.

I wanted to get to your point about the airports. I fly for government from Hamilton to Ottawa. When WestJet said that they were pulling all their flights out, they didn't ask about the customer. When Air Canada Jazz pulled all their flights out from Hamilton to Ottawa, and then we all had to drive to Toronto, they didn't ask the customer. Will they lose business? Yes. Are they a good airline? Are they a good business? I can tell you that Air France has just bought some of the railroads in France.

Whether Air Canada can modernize, adapt, and buy into the new multimodal strategy the rest of the world has, we'll see.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Is the question we are being asked to decide whether we are going to prefer rail travel in the corridors as opposed to air travel? In other words, it is sort of forcing a change. I think right now we have either.... The preferred routes, at least in terms of the short window, might be car or air. Are we asking to make a decided shift in what the backbone of the transportation system will be?

[Cliff Mackay]

I think there are two ways you could put that question. That's certainly one way. There is another way you could say it. Historically, at least in the last 50 to 70 years in this country—if you go back to the 1900s, you could make a different case—at least since World War II, governments have implicitly or explicitly made the choice to go with air or road, because that's where the government money went. Passenger rail has not received any significant investment in this country for a long, long time.

You can either say that you're making the choice to favour one, or you can say that we're going to redress the balance and let consumers make their own choices.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I'm not by any means suggesting that I'm not prepared to make the choice. I'm just asking if that's what you're really talking about here.

[Cliff Mackay]

You could ask the question either way.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Jeff, I'm sorry, you're out of time.

We're going to Mr. Kennedy.