Transport committee  Again, by allowing those proposals to float up from the bottom as opposed to being dictated from the top. In a lot of communities their public transit could be as simple as buying a couple of small buses and running them in the morning and in the afternoon, not throughout the d

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  Again, there's no public transit system in North America that recovers its capital costs. So every single public transit project, from an economic point of view, is not viable and needs to be subsidized. If you're entering into subsidies, it automatically means you're dedicating

Transport committee  I'm sorry if that's the implication I left, because that isn't what I was trying to communicate. What I was trying to say is that each municipality, regardless of whether it's large or small, has a basket of infrastructure assets, and some of them are better maintained than other

Transport committee  Absolutely, and actually, the gas tax is allocated proportionate to their population.

Transport committee  Right, but they can direct that money to their other infrastructure needs. That's the nature of the omnibus programming that I described earlier: it allows each community to bring forward their priorities and to deal with them. Let me give you an another example. Wharves and har

Transport committee  I see your point, but that difference has been largely made up through the accessing of the non-distributed funding, which is the Building Canada fund. The Building Canada fund is allocated per province, but not per municipality. The gas tax is different.

Transport committee  It's allocated per province and then suballocated by municipality. So there are two different funding instruments.

Transport committee  Right--

Transport committee  --and all those large transit projects that I mentioned earlier are coming from that second pot of money.

Transport committee  The gas tax funding tends to go towards their core existing systems. So in Toronto, for instance, the vast majority of gas tax funding that went to transit would go to the existing operations of the TTC. Some of that would be split between funding for subway lines and funding for

Transport committee  It's not operational, but it augments the existing services. So, for instance, by buying more buses, you're expanding the scope of your service reach by improving your track network if you're working on a subway, but it's not as delineated a project as a typical Building Canada p

Transport committee  Yes, it tends to be improving existing services.

Transport committee  It's still capital funding.

Transport committee  Terrific. Specifically in Edmonton and Calgary, both projects have gone towards extensions of rapid rail, so it's the heavy rail in Calgary and Edmonton. In terms of other keystone projects that have happened across Canada, the largest single one has been Toronto's York subway e