Transport committee  The funding is pretty public in terms of what the federal government can bring to the table. Our primary funding instrument is the Building Canada fund. The Building Canada fund has a specific allocation per province. Then, as I said, we negotiate on a bilateral basis with those

Transport committee  I am not an expert on bus regulations. Provinces are supposed to regulate the acceptability of certain types of vehicles. Honestly, that matter comes under provincial jurisdiction.

Transport committee  To the extent that provinces are comfortable with that, we do obviously engage large-city mayors. In fact a lot of our public transit investments, just by their nature, have gone to big cities. The largest public transit projects on our books are Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calga

Transport committee  Yes. Over the last five years, the Government of Canada has directly provided $5 billion in program expenditures. It has provided another $1.1 billion through the gas tax, which, as I mentioned earlier, the municipal sector accesses on its own. That's over $6 billion in direct fe

Transport committee  I don't have the data on hand, but I am almost certain that the gas fund was involved. If we can find out anything else, I will let you know after the meeting.

Transport committee  Well, on the formula, what the government has chosen to do over the last decade or so--again, in different manifestations--is to create omnibus infrastructure programs. Instead of saying that we're doing a program for public transit, a program for water, or a program for cultural

Transport committee  Prior to 2006, the main funding instrument for transit was the Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund. That fund in total had about $4.3 billion, and I believe about $1.5 billion of that went towards transit. So the quantum is significantly higher today. Prior to that period, the

Transport committee  I'll flip your question around a little and answer it this way. If you were to look at public transit strictly from an economic point of view, there wouldn't be any public transit.

Transport committee  I know--

Transport committee  I know. Right, but I was--

Transport committee  In the past we did do a capital cost-benefit analysis on transit projects.

Transport committee  There are two parts to your question: the first is operating and the second is capital. In terms of operating, generally speaking across Canada, the fare recovery tends to be 50%. Some are better and some are worse. Toronto's TTC actually has one of the best cost-recovery rates

Transport committee  Right. The benchmark tends to be what a community is willing to bear for that service, because transit is not only a means of transporting people back and forth; it's also a means of developing your community. So you tend to--

Transport committee  As you could expect, they were all negative. So the question was, to what extent were the other non-economic benefits greater than that? The short answer is that because the returns are always negative, you can't have a positive negative return, if I'm explaining that properly.

Transport committee  To my knowledge, no. Sorry.