Transport Committee on Sept. 24th, 2018

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have to preface my comments with the following statement. Under the new norm with respect to the need to diversify our trade patterns—to be less reliant on the most obvious market, which is the U.S. market—it is evident that Ontario plays a major part in the economy of Canada with respect to our GDP. For example, when we see a GDP level of about $795 billion, or $56,900 per capita, it's quite evident how we participate in the success of our country's overall economy.

It was mentioned earlier how underutilized the seaway is and how underutilized our current assets are. It seems that the capital is there, and the bricks and mortar, and of course the incentives are there. For example, it has been recognized as a foreign trade zone point.

What more can be done? How do we formally recognize the trade corridor? How do you participate in that? What investments are needed to bring Ontario to the next level of performance, allowing our country to strengthen our international trade performance?

[Roy Timms]

Mr. Badawey, you touched on the unused lands around the Welland Canal, and I think that's a big key. The port of Hamilton now is full. It has no capacity anymore.

There is about a 20-mile stretch of canal where the federal government owns significant lands on both sides of the canal. The lands are undeveloped. The municipalities would welcome opening those lands up for economic employment lands.

I think that's key. I think the mid-peninsula highway is key because the idea behind the mid-peninsula highway is to join Niagara Falls to Hamilton and to the existing 400-series highways from Hamilton to London. That would speed up the traffic flow significantly.

Those are two key things.

[Patrick Robson]

I believe that's similar to the port of Montreal. Again, I'm a planner. The port of Montreal has functioned as a break bulk point where transshipment activity takes place.

If we're talking about international trade and particularly about being able to capitalize on the interior of the continent with places such as Europe, I think that we should be making the Welland Canal function more as a break bulk point with infrastructure for things like rail-on-apron. As Mr. Timms pointed out, that becomes the enabler for additional industrial activity and value-added manufacturing, and it allows us to perhaps be a little less reliant on one channel of trade.

[Verne Milot]

I think—and this is partly the answer to Mr. Badawey's question and also Mr. Jeneroux's—that there certainly are going to be people along the existing congested QEW corridor who are going to want to say, “Let's keep all the traffic going here.”

Let's take a silly analogy of most living organisms: We have doubling of all the parts that we need to survive. We have two eyes. We have two arms. If we only had one eye, we'd no longer survive.

If you look strategically at the vulnerability of the QEW, you will see that it's high. It's over-congested right now, and we need to create another arm. At least that way we will have doubled perhaps the most vulnerable land trade corridor in Canada. Over and above that, we can justify it economically.

We're opening up lands for growth that are empty right now in an area that is not congested. I think it's fundamentally simple to look at it in that regard.

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

I'd agree with colleagues, but I'd like to take a more 21st century approach, which is that we can do things smarter.

We need the bandwidth where we have the choke points, but moving cargo from ship to port, to terminals, to logistics handlers, to truck, to rail.... We're adding a new major bridge in Windsor-Detroit, the Gordie Howe bridge, and getting the trucks off the bridge, getting them to the points where they get to rail and to ships is smarter work. I think that not only can this corridor lead in the world, but Canada can lead the world in terms of logistics handling and intermodal movement.

That's a piece that I'd like to direct specifically in answer to your question. We can absolutely use more capacity at choke points, but we can be smarter about leveraging the investment and the capacity that we have.

Here in Niagara, and in Ontario and Quebec, I like to view this marine superhighway as a continental marine superhighway. There's great opportunity to leverage those assets with smarter movement of goods and people.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Go ahead, Monsieur Aubin.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Nohara, your opening remarks really resonated with me. So I'm going to jump into the discussion we have already started with you.

At this committee, we are often told that Canada is falling behind in some areas. Yet you said that Canada could be a leader in smart traffic. This means that there is no country on the planet that has the expertise you are talking about and that Canada could be among the first countries to have it. Is that correct?

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

Yes, sir, that's precisely what I'm saying.

If you look in Quebec at CIRRELT, which is a global leading research institute on trade and logistics, and here in Ontario at the University of Windsor's Cross-Border Institute, you see that we have tremendous expertise on logistics that parallels our American and European counterparts when it comes to the tracking and movement of trucks. We can put GPS on trucks. We know where they move. We can build models for the distribution points—export and import—including the choke points and how we move that off. However, we go dark when we bring the intermodal connections into the marine domain. We're blind in the marine domain.

CIRRELT and CBI have partnered with us. They recognize that if we could collect the big data that shows in real time and historically the connections between the terminal and the logistics and the routes and the trains, and then connect that to the marine domain and deal with the pleasure craft and the obstructions we face in the marine domain, that data can be mined. It could be mined not only to provide real-time congestion traffic management across the whole system but also to build and learn from where the obstructions occur and then build best practices.

They say on the research side that we would indeed be the leader, by far, in a world where nobody has tackled that problem. We have all the pieces right now.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

In other words, the only way a system like that can work is, if all partners are connected to the same network. We can sell the principle of technology all we want, but if not everyone is connected, we will end up with the same problems.

To obtain those data, should the federal government take the lead and impose such technology on all the partners? Otherwise, it remains a fine objective, but the results will be more difficult to achieve.

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

Your observations, again, are bang on, sir.

What you may be lacking is that we have the technology today for what we call shared maritime domain awareness, or MDA. It has been developed over the last 15 years because of post-9/11 concerns, but now it's making its way into the commercial and shipping and logistics handling areas as an application.

The Canadian government has strategies at the highest level across all federal departments. In fact, the interdepartmental marine security working group, which is a group of Transport Canada, recognizes the need for federal partners to share MDA.

We have Canadian technology. It's been fielded in small-scale full operations, so we're ready to go. It requires no IT infrastructure, other than your cellphone or mobile device or computer, and access to the Internet. It's already being used in small pockets around this system, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping system. It's ready to go.

Expanding the infrastructure so that we can see the entire system and the connections: the training, the ports, terminal operators, seaway users—all the stakeholders—and giving the shipping companies and their planning and marketing groups these tools is what will then result in decision-making that will benefit them. The researchers giving them that big data is what will allow them to look at the patterns, understand the spatial and temporal variations, and then design solutions that would alleviate problems and develop best practices in those areas.

It's a new data source. We are literally mining, both at the raw and refining level, a whole new industry.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have time for a very short question.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

To wrap up this topic, I would like to know whether, in your opinion, implementing this system, if at all possible, will delay or eliminate the construction of new highways.

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

No, it wouldn't delay it. It would add to operational efficiency. There's nothing that ties the two—

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Perhaps my question was not clear. I wanted to know whether, if the system were to be implemented, building new highways could be avoided.

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

I'm not an expert in the highway area. My gut tells me that it wouldn't necessarily change the need for the mid-peninsula corridor. In the future it could possibly change, once you have the operational efficiencies, but I don't believe it would change the need right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay, we move on to Mr. Hardie.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Robson, I think most of my questions are going to come to you.

I worked for the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority. We did an awful lot of planning and visioning. There's an economics principle: If there's a limited supply of something, and a suppressed cost for it, you end up with rationing. When it comes to roadways, the rationing takes the form of congestion. While we look at the concept of a mid-peninsula highway, experience would show that in no time it's going to be filled with general-purpose traffic. The question then becomes, what kind of policy issues or mechanisms, in addition to the technological ones, could be used to ensure that higher-value traffic gets priority?

Should we be thinking about road pricing and all the rest, demand management in a larger envelope that has an awful lot more things going on in the peninsula and right up to the GTA than just the movement of goods and services? You have people being displaced because of high housing costs in Toronto, so they're moving farther out and they want to commute. It's a real mixed bag of things going on, but the pattern is that if you build it, boy, they will come in spades, unless you manage it. What are your thoughts on that in the context of this region?

[Patrick Robson]

Thanks so much for the question.

I mentioned previously the movement of goods and people. It was actually from Metro Vancouver that I heard a great turn of phrase, and it has to do with mass transit, which works better if you bring many people to a few places, not a few people to many places. I believe the same applies to your question. For instance, if we talk about the way we move people and goods, if there's an appropriate separation, what is the functionality of what we're building?

We don't have to go very far. You can find it in the United States. They have a lot of limited-access expressways. They do not create an interchange at every possible crossroad, bringing the development pressure that you rightly point out. You have other public policy tools. It could in fact be a form of fee-for-service roads, that type of thing, available to you. But I think the primary one among them is limited access, only at the most appropriate juncture points.

We've talked about the Welland Canal. That would be a natural one. I might not be popular for saying so, but I would think that if you were to focus on limited access, we'd have maybe three, four at the most, interchanges throughout the peninsula. The balance would be part of what we can manage and capitalize here, but also recognizing that it's still a throughput.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Very good. That's it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you.

Mr. Iacono, go ahead.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I have a few questions for Mr. Nohara.

You have piqued my curiosity a little bit. In your speech, you stressed the importance of investing in smart shipping. Unfortunately, it is only recently that I heard about the concept of a smart port. I suppose the practice is likely to grow, given the evolution of new technologies.

How can automation and vehicle autonomy support activities in ports?

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

I'm not sure that driverless vehicles themselves would have a direct impact on port operations. I'm definitely not an expert in that area. The issue, as I understand it, is more that the stakeholders, the logistics handlers, at the terminal facilities.... The ports themselves do not understand where they are—when the ships are coming in and the appointments that have been made between the terminal operators and the shipping companies. That knowledge is not shared, so it's that lack of awareness that I understand is creating the inefficiencies at that nexus.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Is that what you call smart commerce? What does smart commerce entail exactly?

[Dr. Tim Nohara]

I call it smarter shipping, but it's the same word. Let me give you some examples. It's the best way to illustrate it.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Who should be doing this now? Is it the government, or is it the ports?