I don't share the view that there's a death spiral. If you look at the significant investments our government has made in public transit, you see that it has been historic, including accepting the request of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities for a permanent, recurring $3 billion annual public transit fund.
I do get the concern around operating costs. That is an issue I have discussed with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and mayors of big and small cities across the country. We recognize that COVID-19 has been an enormous challenge. We needed these systems to operate to take essential workers to work at a time when others weren't able to do so, or who were safely, perhaps, staying at home. That opened up a real concern around some of this ridership. Remote working, teleworking, has also reduced, in some cases, ridership.
The Government of Canada doesn't operate transit systems. We don't presume to know what the appropriate service standard that a municipal or provincial transit authority might like to undertake. We do recognize these financial pressures. We have evolved the federal support for transit from simply expanding transit networks to looking at rolling-stock repairs, because transit authorities were saying to us that expanding is very expensive, very important, but dealing with the state of good repair of current transit infrastructure is something that we could do. Our government so far, other than during the COVID-19 emergency payments to provinces, has not supported the operating costs of transit authorities.