Transport committee  If you're talking about high-speed rail, I think the biggest thing the government could do would be to expedite the study, get it out of the way and get to a decision point so that we can start to move on land assembly and engineering studies. Those are nowhere near as expensive, of course, as the construction costs, but they're absolutely a precondition to being able to get anywhere.

Transport committee  Generally speaking, the Alberta government has been assembling land for quite some time, a number of years, not simply for high-speed rail. They have a concept of a transportation corridor that could accommodate any range of basic services and utilities. They've been doing that for quite some time.

Transport committee  One of the nice things about high-speed is that it stops very quickly and it goes very quickly.

Transport committee  What you would have to do is ensure that local rail or local bus or local metro, or whatever it is, would in fact connect into a node where people could transfer from one to the other. The high-speed rail is a unique kind of rail. I don't want to get into all the technological side, but you don't run regular trains on a high-speed track.

Transport committee  In that particular case, there is very little freight that runs on that line.

Transport committee  In some cases, but not every five minutes. You know what I mean? You're going to have those stations far enough apart that it makes some sense in terms of the efficiency of the system. So you still need other modes or other parts of the system that feed. That's exactly how the models have been developed in other parts of the world.

Transport committee  I don't mean to say they're separate. They just don't operate on exactly the same track. For example, let's take the French system. If you go from Lyon to Paris, there are a number of stops along the way. At those stops, if you looked at a map, you would see all sorts of feeder rail lines going into that particular stop.

Transport committee  It's hard to say. Ottawa has well over a million people in the immediate area, so frankly it may very well be a candidate for a high-speed rather than a local connection.

Transport committee  No, sir. At that time I was in the airline business.

Transport committee  No, you're absolutely right. I would not see them, though, as major financing vehicles. I would say that it's much more probable that institutions like OMERS or teachers or the caisse, or some of the other bigger private outfits like Mr. Schwartz's fund, would probably be more interested in this aspect of it than some of the other companies you just mentioned.

Transport committee  It's not inconceivable. It's certainly not their core business. I think both companies would say that their core business is freight in a continental context, and that is where they're focusing now, but they're in business to do business, and if someone were to come along and say, “Here's a business proposition; it may leverage your assets, and it may make sense from a business perspective”, I would be surprised if they didn't look at it seriously.

Transport committee  My understanding is that in the Ontario-Quebec study, in Toronto and in Montreal the baseline case is to go to Union Station and down to Central Station. That's the baseline case. I don't know whether that will be the final case, but I know that's what's in the baseline.

Transport committee  Right.

Transport committee  Let's just say $15 billion is the initial front-end cost. I'm going to talk about the central Canadian corridor, not the Alberta corridor. Frankly, the Alberta corridor would be significantly less than that--significantly less. The swing factor would be how much land assembly you would have to do and how much you could arrange through existing corridors.

Transport committee  I'm not sure that I would make the assumption that it would be 100% government. Depending on the business case and the interests of financiers, there are very large pools of capital, as you know, that are very interested in long-term infrastructure investments. Some of those pools of capital are right here in Canada.