I'll give you some examples. We have in Toronto a city that has had a subway system for 57 years. Not only has it built up the ability to handle the maintenance and even the expansion of that subway system through its own expertise, but it is also self-regulating with respect to safety inspections. That doesn't always work well. Some years ago there was a catastrophic accident and a fire on the Toronto subway. Really it was a case of safety measures having become somewhat archaic and no longer working reliably. With an outside federal regulator, that might not have been a problem.
Of course, since that fire and incident, Toronto is now in a much better position to guarantee safety. But smaller communities can't necessarily afford those resources.
Right now, for example, Ottawa is establishing the rail expertise necessary to build and operate the downtown transit tunnel and the 12-kilometre light rail line that will operate through it. But establishing a railway safety office in the city of Ottawa just to keep an eye on 12 kilometres of track, particularly if it needs to be at arm's length from the engineers and managers who are running the system, I think, becomes very difficult. It will be difficult as well in other cities that develop rail systems, such as Kitchener-Waterloo.
I really think there is a role for the existing federal government expertise. It will be in setting a very high standard by the federal Department of Transport; in investigations by the Transportation Safety Board; and in research by the Centre for Surface Transportation Technology, which is located here in Ottawa as an offshoot of the National Research Council, which is now actually largely privately funded. Those kinds of federal resources would be of immense value to Canadian municipalities as they move into transit technologies that may be new to them.