Transport committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon. I’m Doug Switzer, president of Motor Coach Canada, the national association representing the private transit operators of Canada, the motor coach operators supplying scheduled, charter, transit, and tour services. Joining me today are Réal

Transport committee  Thank you. The bottom line is that the savings to taxpayers that can be achieved by partnering with private operators are substantial. A recent study conducted for the Ontario Motor Coach Association compared the operating costs of a group of private carriers with those of large

Transport committee  No. I think our intent would be to remove the tax on the private tickets, not to increase taxes on public transit.

Transport committee  I wouldn't speak to that, because I think they're in slightly different businesses than we are.

Transport committee  We certainly would--I don't know if the government would--but we're not necessarily in direct competition with them. When I say we're in competition, there are instances where we have a private bus operator, say Coach Canada or Greyhound, on one side of the street, and directly

Transport committee  You wouldn't pay tax on your train ticket if it was a publicly run system.

Transport committee  I don't know. You'd have to ask the train industry about that.

Transport committee  You're talking about contracting out...? Yes, about a third of the systems in Canada currently contract out some portion of their operations. Quite often it's not the entire operation. They usually keep some portion of the system run by the municipality and contract out a portion

Transport committee  Sure.

Transport committee  Public-private partnerships, like any government policy tool that is used, are not universally perfect. You can always poke holes in the idea of contracting out or of public-private partnerships by pointing to places where it hasn't worked well. Not all of them have been perfect.

Transport committee  We can certainly give you information that they are as safe. I frankly don't want to get into a debate about which is safer than the other--

Transport committee  No, actually she started it, by accusing us of being less safe.

Transport committee  Because it has been demonstrated in many other municipalities. I think the answer to the London example you gave us was that it happened in the seventies, when the idea of contracting out was in its infancy. As with any new idea, people made mistakes at the beginning. I'm not an

Transport committee  I want to clarify that. I don't think we asked for a subsidy. We're not asking for a subsidy. We're actually offering to return a subsidy to the government. We would operate it at a lower cost than the currently subsidized system. We're not looking for a subsidy or a break on fue

Transport committee  No, I don't think we're saying that at all. We're saying that we're comparable to the public systems. Safety is always a relative thing. There's no such thing as a perfectly safe system. Today, as we speak, in the city of Toronto a debate is occurring about having mandatory drug