Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A solid urban transportation network is vitally important for quality of life, for economic development and for a healthy environment, all of which are of great concern to Canadians. More and more Canadians are recognizing that an investment in a safe

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Crête. Yesterday, I arrived in Montreal by train and saw the traffic congestion on the roads. I met the leaders of a number of transit companies in Quebec. These companies, as you have said, have development plans. For transit, a development plan

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I want to thank the member for the question. Yes, what we're asking for right now, $2 billion, is for capital.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  And I wish to thank the member for his support for public transit. It's very appreciated.

Finance committee  Good evening. My name is Bernard D'Amours and I am the Director of Public Affairs for the Canadian Urban Transit Association. I would like to begin by thanking the committee for the opportunity to speak today. This is a very strong signal that all parties in the House recognize

Finance committee  That's the reason I said we would like to have some dedicated funding towards public transit. The government announced $4 billion towards infrastructure, which is okay, but we don't know--

Finance committee  The only thing I can say is we hope so. We know that there were some announcements made last week, and we hope that others will follow. That's the only thing we can say.

Finance committee  Yes. We represent 120 transit systems across Canada. We sent them an e-mail and we had some discussions. We had an indication that the government was going to make some announcements and we asked them to provide us with a list of projects that would be shovel-ready and could be d

Finance committee  We feel that we should start with the federal government: that's where the funds are. Once the federal government has accepted funding the projects, then we can start discussing with the provinces and the municipalities.

Finance committee  They're part of our organization, but sometimes some of our transit members will have different priorities; they will not always share with us. Perhaps it was a project they were interested in.

Finance committee  There may be some confusion, Mr. Pacetti. We support making employee transit passes tax deductible. We have always supported this measure. As it so happens, Mr. Obama increased the deduction from $120 to $230 per month in his...

Finance committee  According to our surveys, it is extremely hard to say if this measure has contributed to an increase in ridership levels. As I mentioned, ridership has increased by 3% per year and was up about 15% overall between 2002 and 2007. However, no one has been able to establish a clear

Finance committee  A total of $4 billion has been announced for transit infrastructures, but we are looking for long-term public transit funding.

Finance committee  We haven't quoted a figure, but to give you an idea, in last year's budget, somewhere between $400 million and $500 million were committed through the transit trust program.