Oh, man—you don't give me the easy question. Yes, that is a tough question.
There are some things that I think we need to consider. There are a few principles we want to remember, to begin with, including the issues around the fact that this transportation policy does impact all these other policies and that transportation also facilitates many other activities and programs and policies in rural places.
One thing to understand is that the cost of transport is also a cost that can be attributed across these other activities. I think we also want to remember that other kinds of activities receive certain kinds of subsidies. We've talked about automobility today. We've talked about the way that systems of transportation have developed so that they really favour the automobile and they favour trucks. They essentially externalize the costs of automobiles and trucks onto the general public. Their costs are actually higher than they appear to be. I think I would start by keeping those two things in mind.
Then I would also understand that there are many kinds of creative solutions that one can engage in at this point and that one can take advantage of—for example, new technologies. One can be thinking, in some ways, about developing systems of transportation so that one can take advantage of things that are happening in other places and piggyback on systems that are already in place.
Also, I think one important thing is that we need to start to change what it means to ride the bus and what it means to use public transportation, and particularly in rural areas—and this is taking this in a direction that perhaps is a little bit less expected. That includes paying attention to the marketing aspects of transportation and also thinking about the services that are available and the extent to which people are able to rely upon the bus. The gentleman from Newfoundland who was talking about being able to offer the bus more frequently, I think, is really thinking about this in the right way. We know that when people have more access to public transportation and it's quite reliable and they know that it's there and that it's safe, they tend to use it more.
On the other hand, I think one thing we tend to do, as we heard in speaking about Saskatchewan here, is that as costs go up, we tend to retract services, which means that people use them less. What we need to do is start thinking about the expansion of service and then what people are looking for in these services, and as Dr. Perry was talking about, start looking at the different users and potential users of services and the needs they have in order to use these services so that we are responding to the actual needs that people are expressing.
That's where I would start.