Thank you.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being here.
As you can probably tell from the discussion, we probably have the same goals but a different idea of how we should get there. As you correctly surmised, a lot of it revolves around how the federal government contributes to the building of public transit in the country, and from our perspective we're not always happy with choices not necessarily based on a common framework, common ground rules, in terms of funding. I think that's what we're trying to say.
We're not trying to suggest that the government be prescriptive about thou shalt only have this particular type of bus or thou shalt only have.... But we're concerned that different communities get different responses from federal funding or different parts of communities get different responses from federal funding, depending on political decisions, perhaps, or political interference with the decision-making process. That's part of the reason we're proposing that there be a national strategy, that it becomes “agnostic”, is your word--I like it--that it becomes apolitical, that the decision-making in terms of investments in public transit have none of the colour we've seen over the years, particularly in Toronto, where we dig a hole, fill it in, dig it again for the Eglinton subway. Here we go with a lot of money being spent on infrastructure that finally gets built, but 20 years late.
I've heard you agree that there currently isn't enough money in the system. I won't ask you to describe how much money there should be, but ought there to be more and ought it to be as part of a strategy rather than just ad hoc?