Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here. I certainly appreciate your testimony today and your participation in a review of our transportation system.
Mr. Emerson, it would be my privilege to ask you a couple of questions. We're at an interesting time in Canada. In your report, the “Pathways” report that you provided to government, which in some ways was the precursor to Bill C-49, you said on a few occasions that the theme of the report was the relationship between trade and our systems of commerce, and our transportation system, and getting those goods to markets in Canada, in North America, and around the world.
You, as a former minister of international trade, would know that we have a unique opportunity in that we're renegotiating and modernizing NAFTA at the same time that we are supposed to be modernizing our transportation networks for the next 30 years.
In your consultations, did you hear a demand, particularly from the air and the trucking side, for the transborder cabotage approach to linking the North American transportation system, and wouldn't this window—of renegotiating NAFTA— which didn't exist when you wrote the report, be an obvious opportunity to integrate the transportation system in North America?