Transport committee  I think that trying to engineer the desires of the population is a really slippery slope. Regrettably, we're now experiencing the result of that with the community schools and some of the programs we had in northern Canada. That attempt to engineer society, to do something it did

Transport committee  Sorry.

Transport committee  Right. There have been lots of initiatives. This government currently has a plan to put more bandwidth into rural communities. The challenge with that is simply the expense. I was in India recently, working with a company that is installing 25,000 kilometres of high-speed fiber

Transport committee  Yes, I agree that municipalities know best, but there's a difference between fair and equal. The equal thing to do is not necessarily the fair thing to do. In this case, the guys with the best ideas would get the most funding. So, yes, do provide additional funding and let muni

Transport committee  Absolutely.

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  We have that model. We have cities that are bidding for.... In the case of Ottawa, it's a light-rail project. The federal government has contributed money towards that; thank you very much. Do they have specific outcomes they have to meet? Absolutely. I don't think anyone would f

Transport committee  Right.

Transport committee  I think it's the regulatory issue. If we look at some of the smartest cities in the world, none of them have had their infrastructure built by the private sector. None of the Bells and Teluses and the comparables of the world have been able to put in sufficient bandwidth to make

Transport committee  I can start if you like. I drive a beautiful, 6-cylinder, 300 horsepower vehicle, which burns more gas than it should. Should I pay more tax than I am for that? Yes. We all know it's not good for the economy, and I should be paying more. I remember going to Europe for the first

Transport committee  That is a good question. If it's okay with you, I will answer in English.

Transport committee  I sit on the board of the Intelligent Community Forum, out of New York City. You may know them as the ones that announce the 21 smartest cities every year, and then the top seven, and then finally the most intelligent city. We have a process for evaluating these cities. We began

Transport committee  I'm sorry, “You can't drive on the Toyota roads or the Ford roads, but only the Subaru roads. The more roads Subaru builds, the better your life is going to be.” That's insane. None of us would ever expect that, but it used to be that way back in the day. If I built a road, it wa

Transport committee  Thank you. We sometimes think of the issue of urbanization as a third world issue. On average, there are about a million people a week who move from the countryside to the city in places like India and elsewhere, but the same thing is happening in North America. We're finding th