Transport committee  We could easily get those numbers for you. The Ontario government would have them readily available.

Transport committee  Yes, I agree.

Transport committee  The operating assumption at the moment has been that you need to connect into the major hubs--for example, Union Station, or Central Station in Montreal, or the station here. On whether you could do it otherwise, the short answer is of course you could, if the numbers made sense.

Transport committee  All I can tell you is that in most jurisdictions around the world that is precisely what has happened. Where there is high-speed rail for a relatively short period of time--and I'm talking about three- to four-hour trips, not twelve hour trips--the passengers have shifted to train rather than air for two reasons: one, the convenience; and, two, generally speaking, the rail systems have been able to offer more competitive pricing because they have much higher volumes in the same unit.

Transport committee  That I don't know. I really don't know the thresholds on the highway--

Transport committee  I'm not sure of the degree to which you would like to look forward 10 to 20 years to quote new technologies, but there have certainly been some studies that have looked at intermodal relationships and how everything gets put together and what should happen. Most of the work that gets done argues very strongly for the following kinds of relationships on the passenger side.

Transport committee  I think there would have been two substantial differences, and Mr. Langan mentioned one of them right off the top. You would have seen the congestion that you now see on the 401 develop much more slowly than it did develop, because a large number of those people would probably have opted to take the train rather than to take the car.

Transport committee  The answer, sir, is yes. I don't have those numbers off the top of my head, but it costs billions of dollars to go from twin to three lanes on the 401, which is exactly what's going on today.

Transport committee  I think it's a combination of things. First, there clearly needs to be political leadership on something like this. These sorts of activities have never happened anywhere in the world, including Canada--you can talk about the seaway, you can talk about the pipelines, you can talk about the Trans-Canada Highway, you can talk about the CPR back in its day--without some clear political leadership and direction.

Transport committee  I think the answer is somewhat. The problem is that you have bottlenecks in various parts of the system. The other major problem with using those existing corridors is grade crossings. There are literally thousands of grade crossings on those main-line corridors. You absolutely cannot have grade crossings with high-speed rail.

Transport committee  You're absolutely correct. If you're going to develop high-speed rail, as Mr. Langan defined it, you need a separate rail system. You cannot operate both of them safely at those speeds. When I was referring to the current VIA project, what's going on there, is that we're producing longer high-speed sidings and whatnot so that we're allowing more efficiency in the use of the existing tracks for both passenger and freight.

Transport committee  It's difficult to give you a precise answer, but let me try to lay out at least some parameters. We do have some recent examples of this kind of financing in Canada that have been quite successful. I should say that. The cost would be driven essentially by two things. The first is the nature of the business relationship between the public and private party.

Transport committee  Okay. That would probably amount to about 20% to 25% of the overall initial costs. You're probably looking at $4 billion to $5 billion there. You're basically looking at a $15 billion financing requirement. The critical element that will drive that financing requirement is the degree to which you can demonstrate in a financial prospectus reasonable predictability on revenue flows for that particular enterprise—ideally, revenue flows at a level that would pretty much guarantee some reasonable return to the investors.

Transport committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As president and CEO of the Railway Association of Canada, I welcome the opportunity to appear before the committee today to speak on the subject of high-speed rail in Canada. Our membership, as you know, includes Canadian class one freight railways, CN and CP; a number of U.S. class one railways that operate in Canada, such as BNSF; and some 40 shortline freight railways.

Transport committee  No, that sort of information is generally available to the shipper community anyway.