Absolutely, and I'm delighted that you brought it up. The GTAA takes a very long-range look both to the role of Pearson airport in the community and to the impact we have on that community. It's our view that the only sustainable option we have at the present time is to look for alternative means to get passengers--and workers, by the way--to the airport. Therefore, you actually have to start looking at a varied approach.
On the one hand, we are delighted by the initiatives that have been taken to actually have the link to downtown. The air-rail link has been initiated. We have an environmental assessment proceeding. I think that is a terrific initiative.
We are also working very closely right now with all of the transportation agencies in Mississauga, in Brampton, and in the city of Toronto, and with Metrolinx, to augment the mass transit systems to the airport, which, I completely concede, are woefully inadequate. We have about 42,000 people working at the airport. We are in an area, as you are very familiar with, that is economically depressed. We are a major employment centre, but one of the major gaps we have is, simply, that the access to the airport itself is inadequate. So right now we are working with the TTC and with Metrolinx on the engineering drawings to see if we can bring the Eglinton light rail transit system into the airport. We're doing the same thing along Finch.
We have been working very closely with Brampton. After all, most of our employees come from the north and the west, so we're working with Brampton to improve the transit service into the airport, keeping in mind the very odd and unusual hours that we have at the airport. Our peak time for employees is about five o'clock in the morning.
I completely agree with you: we have to take these small steps before we're going to take the larger step of high-speed rail. However, the concept remains the same. The intermodality of rail and air and the movement of people is essential to the long-term health of the system we have, so it is something we're pursuing very vigorously.