Thanks so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all of our witnesses. I think this is a really important study.
I come to this from the perspective of a part of the country that has predominately rural and remote communities. I was thinking about it, and I believe that transportation options, particularly for low-income folks in rural Canada, are worse now than they have been in a hundred years.
We used to have a train that ran on time, a passenger rail system that was given priority on the rail corridor. In the part of the world where I live, the train might be eight hours late. We used to have a bus service, a national bus service on which you could travel from coast to coast on a single ticket, a service that served almost every rural community in the country. Now, as we've heard, we have a patchwork that fills a fraction of what Greyhound used to serve. I think this is a huge gap in our country, and it has truly national implications, so I'm very appreciative that the committee has made time to talk about this issue.
I want to start by talking about the issue of leadership. What we've heard from the witnesses so far is that there is a need for someone to pull together all of these strings and to create something from what exists in this patchwork of public and private bus options across the country.
Perhaps I'll direct this question to Mr. Johnson. I wonder who in Canada right now is best positioned to provide that leadership.