Thank you very much for the question.
That's a really important question, because we take our accountability to the public and to the municipalities very seriously. Fundamentally, we can't deliver on our objectives as a corporation unless we have a strong partnership with our municipalities and, in the end, with the public we're serving.
Metrolinx originally started with a board of directors that was largely comprised of municipal politicians. The mayors of many of the municipalities in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area were on the board, and they were very successful, in 2006 through to 2008, in coming up with a first for the greater Toronto and Hamilton area: a regional transportation plan. We have never had, in this region, a comprehensive plan that all the municipalities bought into. They were given the task to come up with a plan and they succeeded. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the mayors and councillors who were on the board at that time.
The province took a look at how Metrolinx was going to evolve in the future and, first of all, merged it with GO Transit, an operating agency. They felt that it was time to switch from planned development to delivery of specific projects. They felt it was appropriate to bring in public-spirited citizens to help remove some of the tension around decision-making about which projects go first, second, third, and fourth, and to bring a very deliberate approach to how we build the infrastructure going forward.
That doesn't mean we conduct our work in secret. Our meetings are basically built into two elements. We have a public session, where the media and the public are fully engaged and hear about the work of Metrolinx, as everyone else does. Then we have a closed session, like any public agency tends to have to talk about contractual or commercial or property issues and things of that nature.
We've tried to maintain our accountability and we've tried to be true to the government objective of moving forward with delivery.
The other thing we were able to do when we brought in the public-minded citizens was to identify specific skill sets. We have a member of our board who is the leader at the Four Seasons Sheraton for customer service. Nick Mutton chairs our customer service committee and has been very successful in raising the level of customer satisfaction in our operating arm--