Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to all of our witnesses. Thanks for being with us this evening. I'm looking forward to this study. I think it's going to be of interest to a lot of Canadians.
I'd like to start my questions with Mr. Johnson. What you had to say about this project was very enlightening, particularly all of the twists and turns it's taken since its first iteration.
I'd like to start from the perspective of being a British Columbia MP representing a rural region in the northwest of the province that's thousands of kilometres from here and that has a passenger rail system that is a mere shadow of what it used to be. When I talk to people about train service—or bus service, for that matter—so many people talk to me about their vision of having reliable and effective passenger rail service, yet the current Via Rail service through our region is terribly unreliable. It can't be used as basic transportation but only as, really, a tourist sort of opportunity.
When we look at this idea of essentially privatizing Canada's busiest passenger rail corridor and the source of some 85% of Via Rail's revenue—we're going to hand all that over, including the conventional Via Rail service along that corridor, to a private company and take it out of Via Rail's hands entirely—it would seem that our public passenger rail provider in this country is going to be left with the guts and feathers of passenger rail. I'm very concerned about what the fate of rail service in other parts of the country is going to be.
Can you kind of play the tape forward 20 years? What does this look like for Via Rail?