Thank you, Mr. Chair.
For the benefit of my colleague, there's a fourth coast: Ontario has over 1,000 kilometres of coastline on its southern boundary, so why don't we just stick with sea through to sea, which is our motto? guess?
Thank you to our witness for appearing. This will be a very different round of questioning. Admittedly, your position among the witnesses has been very unique. Everyone to this point has supported, in some measure, a national transit strategy of some nature. You're the first one who has outright rejected the concept, so I'm not sure if I can ask questions now about the contents of a potential national transit strategy.
But you do raise something that, through the course of listening to witnesses, began to gnaw away at me a little. A professor appeared here, testifying as an individual, and I posed a question to him about what the idea of a transit strategy is attempting to solve and whether or not it's trying to solve something that's actually federal in nature.
The question I raised is that we likely have a problem with the densification of municipalities as to whether they're sufficiently densified, compounded by the revenue problem for municipalities with respect to provincial downloading. The question I asked was, “Is the federal government now being asked to pick up the tab for problems that were not its own creation?”
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.