Transport committee  As I said earlier, my basis for this project is twofold. One is, we must spend public money more wisely. Right now, we know we are committed to spending some $2.4 billion over the next 40 years on a ferry or an icebreaker, or a freight vessel from Quebec to service the region.

Transport committee  If you ask an academic, he's going to study it and he's going to have all kinds of methodologies. The answer you get depends on the assumptions. There's nothing like giving the parameters or the blueprint to the guy who builds it. That's exactly what should happen in this case.

Transport committee  The Prince Edward Island bridge was done through an RFP. Take what we're doing now with the seniors' complexes in Newfoundland. I don't know so much about everywhere else, but we recently signed an agreement for a seniors' complex on a similar private-public partnership. We go ou

Transport committee  At least.

Transport committee  One of the most dramatic ways to illustrate this is...when the Confederation Bridge was opened in 1997, there were some 700,000 people who had been going to wonderful Prince Edward Island. Last year, there were 1.5 million. Ten years ago, Marine Atlantic was bringing somewhere a

Transport committee  There's no question. When I was in government—and anybody who has looked back over the years—when you looked at the unemployment rate.... Coming across Canada, you start in British Columbia and come across and hit Nova Scotia, but as soon as you hit Prince Edward Island, it went

Transport committee  Thank you very much. I am talking about two things. One is to spend existing money more wisely. Over the next 40 years, we're going to spend some $2.4 billion on ferries, on icebreakers and on the Bella Desgagnés coming from Rimouski down to la Basse-Côte-Nord. That's $2.4 billi

Transport committee  Okay. There are hundreds of thousands of people who will come to create the jobs in areas like the lower north shore of Quebec.

Transport committee  There are a couple of things. First of all, there's the question of population. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, they had a referendum in Prince Edward Island and talked about building the Confederation Bridge. P.E.I. has fewer than 150,000 people, but in 1993, the private secto

Transport committee  The first step is to know the cost, and the second step is to find out how you're going to pay for it. To me, getting to the first step is not a difficult task. I've been in business now for nearly 23 years, and if I have a project, I define my project, whether it's to build a ne

Transport committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you to the members of the committee for the invitation. My project, that I have been following now for nearly 30 years, is the final spike to link Canada from sea to sea. It would have a subsea road tunnel under the Strait of Belle Isl