Typically the way the Government of Canada engages with the provinces and territories on infrastructure issues is on a bilateral basis. We tend to have talks between Canada and Newfoundland, Canada and Ontario, and Canada and Quebec. When we talk nationally, it becomes much more difficult. Again, transit is incredibly important to large urban areas, but there are large swaths of Canada that don't have very large urban areas, or parts of Canada where transit simply isn't salient.
If you look at Toronto, transit constantly ranks as one of the top issues. When you do polling in Toronto, transit and transportation is always, if not at the top, very near the top. That tends to be unusual outside the top ten cities in Canada. Once you leave the top cities in Canada, that drops off dramatically. Transit in these areas is something that people basically don't even think about in their daily lives.
Last week I was in Nunavut. And in Nunavut, I can tell you, there is no public transit. In Iqaluit there is a series of cabs. Outside of Iqaluit there are another 24 communities, and there are not even cabs. So it's very difficult for the federal government to talk about transit on the whole across Canada.
That being said, the Government of Canada has done some things nationally. We have talked about funding already.
The second thing the government has done is to put in some money for ecoMOBILITY, which is very important in the sense that it's helped to make the transit we do have a little more accessible for people.
Moreover, a few years ago, when there were some unfortunate incidents in London with respect to transit, where it appeared there was going to be a terrorist attack on a public transit system, the government provided transit security funding.
The other thing the Government of Canada has done—and I imagine it's something a lot of Canadians have taken advantage of—is that it's provided tax deductibility for transit passes when someone buys a one-year pass, as opposed to buying tickets.
On the whole, these things are salient across Canada. All of the things I just mentioned, to the extent you have a transit system, show a good, constructive role for the federal government to play.
On the flip side, when you start talking about planning, that has different meanings to different people. So I appreciate that when you say “planning”, you mean one set of things, but other people hear a different set of things. They hear “imposition”, they hear “transit share modes”, they hear “mandatory land use planning”, etc.