Transport committee  We're looking at a 50% increase in our ridership over the next 10 years, actually. I don't want to put it in the context that if Bill C-11 doesn't get through, it's not going to happen. It's one of those things that will probably happen faster with Bill C-11, but it's going to happen anyhow.

Transport committee  When you look at the municipal bylaws related to noise, if the municipalities actually applied their bylaws to any transportation infrastructure, you'd shut down every single road at 11 o'clock at night. I mean, that's one of the things, that infrastructure-related stuff is not like the fixed noise component of generators, the banging of dump trucks, and things like that.

Transport committee  Actually, the municipal bylaws really don't apply to us. When we do new rail corridors, we actually go in and do noise tests in the area. We find that the background noise level is much higher than the noise that our introduced services would apply to. We comply with the provincial regulations related to noise, and likewise the federal regulations that currently exist.

Transport committee  No, bylaws don't impact us.

Transport committee  Same. We're perfectly content with this. It really gives us the flexibility to do what we really need to do. It's fair to the railways as well.

Transport committee  For me personally, this is the third piece of legislation, and on the commuter rail side it really hasn't changed. The issue in all of the legislation has never been the commuter rail aspects. I think it's the fact that it was tied up in other elements.

Transport committee  I can use the Milton corridor as an example. I think it was in the late 1980s that the Province of Ontario invested about $30 million into that corridor for track improvements to allow us to run some more trains. What ended up happening was that because of the high access fees in the corridor, we didn't put as many trains as we wanted.

Transport committee  That's true.

Transport committee  We don't have any problems with the noise thing. We think we can work with that. Again, we deal with the environmental assessment process in the province of Ontario, so we're constantly dealing with the noise issues when we're introducing new services.

Transport committee  I'll start off, as the senior person here in both age and length of negotiating time. GO Transit has been negotiating with the railways for 40 years. For the most part, it has been a healthy negotiation with the railways. I'm not here to put the railways down. They negotiate tough.

Transport committee  If you look at replacement value, our big issue is that it's really a double hit. Any time the railways go out and replace any tracks or ties, GO Transit is already paying probably 50%, if not 75%, of that cost through construction and access agreements. To then be charged the replacement value of that asset on top of that would be a double whammy.

Transport committee  We belong to the Railway Association of Canada. We are part of that association.

Transport committee  The Toronto area, of course, has gone through quite a bit of that. I'm also on the executive of both the American Public Transportation Association and the International Association of Public Transport, so I see a lot of what I'll call protectionism, really. Down in the States, they have a buy America clause in all of their procurement contracts, and, of course, Bombardier has had to respond to that by putting plants in the United States, so that over 50% of the components get assembled in the States.

Transport committee  We have two contracts, one with CN that expires in 2010, and one with CPR that expires in, I believe, 2007. For us, we're really not doing this to save money. We would immediately put out more service. We already have plans on the books to double our off-peak service, which really is being held back right now because of the high operating charges from the railways.

Transport committee  We have a couple of specific instances. In the case for GO Transit, we have gone through a process with the railways to acquire some railway lines. We own, actually, approximately 30% of the rail corridors that we now operate on. For us, if the act didn't go through and a rail corridor came up for abandonment, we would pay the monopolistic rate that the railway wanted to charge for the land, and the public sector would pay accordingly--that amount of money.