What this looks like, potentially, is that, if the rest of Via Rail continues to operate as a public service, it needs a very much larger subsidy to provide all the core services that are currently shared with the corridor. That, I think, would be something that we feel wouldn't actually happen at all, and you would in fact see trains like the Skeena just disappear, because the government would look at that and say, “We can't possibly subsidize that.”
The original vision of HFR was to triage the corridor, build a strong financial foundation, build from it, be able to look at Calgary-Edmonton, be able to rebuild our long-distance services and be able to support our remote services to northern and indigenous communities. The surplus of this project—all of the benefits of this project—would be for Canadians and would flow back into making our network stronger.
That is our largest concern with this. By taking revenue risk and putting it on the table, it's going to cost more, it's going to be years before we even begin to lay any track and, at the end of the day, it's going to cost Canadians more for the same train that we had a blueprint for in 2018 and could have got on with building.