Thanks very much. I'm delighted to be here.
I'll try to give you a very short synopsis, and unlike the more technical and economical analyses you've heard and will be hearing, I'm going to focus more on from 60,000 feet up what the public think about this.
I wanted to take the opportunity to consolidate a public case either for or against high-speed rail in the terms that they would see it. The reasons why we want to do that are obviously because for anything to move forward on this--and maybe to make decisions on whether we should move forward on this--we have to consult the public. They're ultimately going to be the consumers who will foot a large part of the bill. It's impossible to imagine this sort of massive project moving forward without political championship and it's impossible to imagine political championship occurring without a strong public endorsement. So I wanted to see whether in fact that was the case. Very recently we talked to a random sample of some 1,650 Canadian households. The work was completed one week ago, so it's very fresh, and that's one of the advantages. It updates it from a consolidated perspective. We have lots of very detailed information about what the economics are, what the technology is, the environmental impacts, and so forth. We don't have a current consolidated picture of what the public thinks about this.
So I wanted to look at this in terms of, first of all, the basic level of awareness or knowledge. Looking at public opinion in a situation where it's rooted in very low levels of fluency or in ignorance isn't particularly helpful, because it's likely to change dramatically. So we wanted to know whether or not there was some kind of basic understanding of what we were talking about and then to test, with a couple of basic indicators, what the public fluency was.
To give you a sense of that, we were surprised to find that the issue of high-speed rail is something that the vast majority of the public claim to have a clear understanding of or to be highly aware of. Some of that is obviously exaggerated, but when we went further and probed on some basic test questions about how we would fuel it and what speeds constitute high-speed rail and so forth, it did appear that in fact a very significant majority of the public not only claimed to have awareness but had a pretty clear understanding of what high-speed rail was.
It was interesting that the awareness and fluency in what high-speed rail was was also connected to support. In other words, the more people knew about it and thought about it, it seemed, the more likely they were to think it was a good idea, and we'll return to that theme.
There were some other familiar patterns. We found that the people who were most aware of high-speed rail tended to be people who lived in the proposed corridors. We found that people who were most aware were the current travelling public, people who were of higher socio-economic status--in other words, more income, more education, which means they'll become involved in public debate, the more influential and so forth.
Without going into that in any detail, I'd like to move on and talk about what we did in the study. First of all, we asked about the levels of support or opposition without giving people any information at all, or just very basic information. So it was based on existing imagery and knowledge. We then walked them through a series of arguments for and against high-speed rail, provided them with a little bit of information that would allow them to reflect and deliberate a little bit more, and we asked the question of support both at the beginning and at the end of the survey. So we had the opportunity to see whether there were any shifts in support and opposition as a consequence of having thought about it a little more. This would simulate to some degree what will happen if there ever is a real debate about this and what kinds of changes we might expect.
We also were able to analyze what was the anatomy of support, what types of arguments were most resonant, which ones tended to sustain support from the beginning to the end of the survey and which ones tended to be less important.
So without going into any detail, some of the things that we looked at were, first of all, in looking at a variety of positive arguments for high-speed rail, most of these were received with strong levels of enthusiasm, with very sizeable majorities of the public agreeing with them, in contrast to the criticisms or arguments against high-speed rail, which tended to receive lower marks of agreement from the public and didn't possess the same levels of resonance.
What we found in terms of assessing the positive arguments was that although people were impressed with things such as the fact that this would have an important environmental impact by reducing carbon, by getting people off roads, and so forth, we also found that the public felt that this would have positive impacts in other areas, such as public safety, and that it would help create a greater sense of national unity.
At the top of the list, the arguments that were by far the most resonant and the ones that tended to survive as people thought about it more and that were associated with their final levels of support or opposition were the economic arguments.
The economic arguments include the short-term economic arguments. People understood and appreciated the economic impacts of such a massive expenditure—and we did remind people that there would be billions of dollars involved in moving forward in such a venture, so they understand that both the direct and induced benefits of this would be sizeable for the country. But even more so, they were impressed with the long-term economic benefits of creating a new infrastructure that would move people faster and more cleanly through the country. In fact, although we hadn't tested it specifically on this survey—but we've tested this on related surveys recently—I believe the public would also support the idea that this would provide more seamless integration with the upper North American economy.
On the arguments against high-speed rail, it's important to note that it wasn't so much that people were opposed as they were saying that they didn't see themselves fitting in there, or they weren't sure it was going to happen, or maybe there was something else we could do that would be more important with the large amount of money. In almost all of those cases, though, more people disagreed than agreed with those propositions.
The thing that seemed to be most linked not so much to opposition but to a sort of drop in enthusiasm was the sense of the political economic fairness: will my part of the country, or I in particular, benefit from this? It is interesting, though, that we did distinguish people by coding those who would lie within the immediate corridors that would be considered at the outset of such a project if it were to occur, and even among those people who didn't live in those quarters, a clear majority supported moving forward with a project like this.
There was, however, a sense of skepticism, and this might have been the most significant exposed flank for moving forward. It's the sense of packing your bags for a trip that you're never going to take. We've heard people talking about high-speed rail for a long time and we're not sure it's going to happen. It sounds like a great idea, but call me when you get started.
There was also a real sense that we would be lagging behind our key trading partners by not having such infrastructure in Canada. There was a sense of acknowledgement that many of the other partners in the advanced western world that we're dealing with have such systems in place and that they're increasingly rooted into the fabric of their economies.
I'll just give you a couple of numbers. The report is being translated and will be available I think in five days, so I encourage you to look at it. To give you a sense of just how strong some of these things were, the initial questions of opposition to or support for high-speed rail produced fully 6% of Canadians who were opposed, with, by corollary, 90% who were in favour. By far the largest category was almost two-thirds who said they would strongly support such a venture.
As we went through and reminded them of the cost and some of the offside arguments and so forth, at the end of the survey we conducted the same question again, and interestingly enough, we found that strong support dropped from 62% to 49% and those people mostly shifted to 37%. In fact, the very scant number of people who were opposed to this didn't rise at all, it stayed the same. So the interesting feature of this is that it is a project that appears to have no real, vociferous, deeply entrenched opposition and a very large number of Canadians who feel very strongly that this would be a terrific idea.
When we went on and asked people who they thought would pay for it, the public tended to line up with the idea of a public-private partnership, which is an idea increasingly attractive to the public. They've seen this used with success in many areas of infrastructure that in the past would have been done by governments alone. It's something that enjoyed by far the highest level of support.
Instructively, when forced to pick between which level of government and whether public or private should take the lead in terms of funding responsibilities, the public leaned to the governments initially having to take the lead. I don't think that means they believe that government should run it, or that they want a state-built high-speed rail system. I think they realized that in fact it would probably be more effectively delivered in the private sector, but they want public oversight of the investment. They realize that ultimately those sorts of funds would not be forthcoming from private investors alone.
Maybe they should talk to Mr. Buffet today, who just ponied up $27 billion for a rail company.
The other thing we found is that when they were asked about the viability of this in the long term, there was a sort of realistic acknowledgement that even after the system was in place there would be ongoing requirements for public funding. Almost two-thirds of the public did not believe it would be revenue-neutral, but they did believe the requirement would be more than offset by the other types of economic benefits that would be delivered by having such an infrastructure in Canada.
We found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians said they would be much more likely to shift to rail. We found that the recruitment to rail with high-speed rail would be particularly strong among current air travellers and current rail travellers and among those who tended to be a little more affluent and a little better educated. But there was certainly a lot of appeal among bus travellers and some among those on the road, though that was the least attractive area of conversion.
In conclusion, this is an idea in which we found that the positive arguments currently eclipse the negative arguments by really a decisive margin. The most powerful arguments are those associated with the immediate and longer-term economic benefits, followed by benefits to the environment. The negative arguments were rated much lower than the “pro” arguments. The most powerful arguments were questions about the intrinsic fairness and a sense of skepticism: that this was a great idea, which they had heard about before, so why haven't we done it yet? There was an understanding that this will require public intervention to make it happen, an understanding that there will be large amounts of public funds required to make it happen, and a preference for involvement by all levels of government. But if forced to choose, the public looks to the federal government for leadership in this area. That, by the way, was particularly true in Quebec.
I'm simplifying what is a pretty simple analysis to begin with. Compared with a range of things that we've looked at—and by the way, we've been doing this for 30 years and have looked at all kinds of public policy initiatives and tested them—I haven't seen anything that came through any more positively than this, and on the current horizon I don't see anything that is as positive as this. It's seen as an area of low-lying fruit by the public, something for which, if anything, the questions aren't whether this is a good idea but why we haven't done it yet.
Thank you.