Thanks, Mr. Badawey.
We certainly believe that the exercise of putting together the financial plans is worthwhile. In most cases, we get positive feedback on what those financial plans look like and how we want to allocate capital in the future.
Where I think the limitation comes in is that the financial plan is submitted, but then there's no response to that financial plan to say, “Okay, how can we enable you in terms of having the right capital to execute on that plan?” That's where our biggest challenge comes.
Based on the Transport Canada comments, we believe they did hear our concerns on that issue and they said they were going to build more financial flexibility into the bill. Our biggest concern is that the flexibility wasn't actually built into the bill. It was an additional reporting requirement and they said that we would now report every three years, and they would review every three years, but in reality there's no prescription setting out what the criteria are going to be to create that flexibility, what the matrix is going to be for setting the borrowing limits and how quickly we are going to be able to respond to those requirements.
Hamilton is one example, but there are some other examples, in Montreal and on the west coast, of how the borrowing limit requests have carried on for two to three years. You have to put projects on hold. You can't respond. You can't do your job while you're waiting.
I really think what we would love to see would be, as was suggested, that we could go into the market and if people and companies were willing to make investments to support future projects, we would be allowed to take advantage of that. Today we can't. That's limiting our ability to really service Canadians.