Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here.
Mr. Facette, I appreciate your mentioning CentrePort. I think it's a very important project, and it's not located right in my riding. The riding I represent is Portage—Lisgar, but the people in Portage—Lisgar support it because they see it's a big picture investment. It's something that will not just have an impact on one part of industry or agriculture or export, but it will have a large impact on all of those sectors, and I think it will be a long-term impact. That sort of frames my question.
I have mayors in my riding who are having real trouble with railway abandonment, for example. This is maybe a bit of a rhetorical question for Mayor Rosen, but if you were a mayor in one of the communities in southern Manitoba, which are growing, thriving, and paying taxes but some of which are actually breaking down because of railway abandonment, and then across the country we want to put some very large amounts of investment into more railway--different types of railway but it's still railway investment--I'm just wondering how you would view that.
My other concern is that we're seeing right now the change in the economy and how quickly things can change. When we put that kind of investment in a particular area, if things do change, it's not like the airline where the airline can decide to look at different routes and won't fly to a certain city because things could change. This infrastructure is there. It's permanent. In layman's terms, how can we justify this kind of large investment? What would the payoff be for all Canadians?