Yes, you could say that you won't finance those kinds of projects--for sure.
Let's say we forecast for the next 10 to 20 years how many people will live in the city, how many people will be in cars, and how many cars will be hybrids and electric cars. Do we need to build tens and tens of kilometres of highway--at the cost of those highways--to move all those people in single-occupancy cars? How will we manage that?
So what's the share...? I'm putting myself at the Canadian level. I'll take 15 big cities in Canada and ask what they are heading for. I'm looking at where the industries establish themselves. I'm looking at how the goods will move from those industries to the ships, to the trains, and to our neighbours in the south.
That said, I know--because I know some of the people working at the Ministère des Transports in Ottawa--that you have what we call an “intelligence-added” value to look at the overall picture in Canada and say that in those 15 cities, forecasting the next 20 years, there are strong implications if you do nothing. What will our involvement be? Which infrastructure is our own and how can we manage to finance a sum that we consider vital for the Canadian economy?
I'll give you the example of the Canada Line, which links the Vancouver airport to downtown. That's a plus. You need that. A big city in 2010 that does not have a link between the airport and the downtown is a city that will lose flights. People will complain that it's not good.