I agree. Any improvement is going to be an improvement. That has to be clear and transparent.
We have to look at tourism and its impact, and, of course, trains are a major impact on tourism, we know, because it's a question of accessibility. When we look at traffic around the world, people go to countries where there are trains. They will travel much more to regions where there are trains than to those where they have no trains. That's a given.
Regarding your concept of bridging and creating these metropolitan areas and merging them together, that's exactly what Amtrak has been planning since the 1990s with the mega-region concept.
As for Via Rail, yes, they have tourist trains that are long-distance, but we have to look at focusing on where the traffic is and where the demand is, and creating these megaregions is the way to go. As metropolitan areas grow and grow, they're becoming closer and closer together, and more and more people travel between the two.
I used to fly between Montreal and Toronto on the Porter flight. I always took the last flight out when I was teaching at York University, and over half of the people on the plane were always the same people every week. We knew each other.
These communities do exist, and this merging of a lot of workers does exist. We have to set up that service if you want people to use it. If not, they'll use their car.