Transport committee  I'm just very glad you mentioned Alberta, because in the case of a service that is less than hourly, hydrogen might economically stack up quite well. For an hourly service, especially at higher speed and higher energy intensity, the ability to feed braking energy back into the catenary, etc., is absolutely vital.

Transport committee  I think it really is the case that the right and left hands can do two different things at the same time here. We can.... This is one of the problems with having separated Via Rail and Via HFR. Via Rail is in somewhat lame duck mode and doesn't know what it's supposed to do for the next 10 years to tackle the challenges we have right now, whereas they could be doing all of the things at once, because these things are synergistic.

Transport committee  That's actually a good question. I want to make one thing clear. We're not opposed to the private sector. We are opposed to getting this wrong. We want to be very pragmatic about this. One of the lessons of the Ottawa LRT project is that the public partner wasn't sufficiently sophisticated.

Transport committee  I've actually spoken with the study team that's been engaged from CPCS by Transport Canada to look at what they're calling HFR, phase two, in southwestern Ontario. Now, the problem I have with this is that they're calling it “phase two”, because actually solving the problems in southwestern Ontario is much easier than solving the problem between Toronto and Ottawa, and we could be solving the problems today.

Transport committee  The most important point is that, even before the joint project office was created, the ridership forecast existed. The business plan existed. The infrastructure assessment existed. All of those things had already been paid for by Via Rail Canada. All that money had already been spent.

Transport committee  That would be accurate as to what our fear is about this project.

Transport committee  What this looks like, potentially, is that, if the rest of Via Rail continues to operate as a public service, it needs a very much larger subsidy to provide all the core services that are currently shared with the corridor. That, I think, would be something that we feel wouldn't actually happen at all, and you would in fact see trains like the Skeena just disappear, because the government would look at that and say, “We can't possibly subsidize that.”

Transport committee  Actually, it's an irony that people think exists, but it isn't even actually accurate. At the moment in the GTA, we have ONxpress partners who have been selected to do codevelopment for GO expansion. They are hiring hundreds of positions for Canadians. They're hiring the same people that Metrolinx could have hired directly.

Transport committee  There are not trade secrets here. There is a tremendous amount of transparency in this industry because they are all public. Via Rail is perfectly capable of running the service. The building of it was always going to involve the private sector—projects always do—but the operation doesn't need to be outsourced.

Transport committee  This is one of the questions we get from a lot of our supporters and members, but there is a really good reason HFR originally avoided it, which is that when you go above 110 miles an hour, costs hockey stick. Costs go up a lot because you have to grade separate everything and you have to realign all the curves, etc., and the project takes many more years to build.

Transport committee  The key to their success as European railways is solid policy and financial backing from their governments. What Transport Action Canada members ask the government to do is to give Via Rail solid policy and financial backing to get the job done. Thank you.

Transport committee  Good evening, Mr. Chair and honourable members. I am very glad to be with you in person today to describe high-frequency rail. My journey from Chatham, Ontario, this morning, took 10 and half hours. If the promises of HFR are kept, that will be six and half—a big difference. HFR when initially announced was supposed to quickly triage Canada's ability to run trains on time and operate enough trains to meet demand, putting Via Rail Canada back on a sound financial footing and getting it ready to build on that foundation across the country.

Transport committee  If I could go first, it is that clearing house. As I said, a lot of the operators don't even have general transit specification feed data on their websites that people can access to find out what the services are. We've tried. I've spent hours and hours trying to work out who's running what and where.

Transport committee  Mr. Bachrach, I will apologize for not having a very good answer for you. My organization did commission a research study over the summer to look at this very question. Maybe, in due course, we will be able to point to models of things that are working. What I would say is what works very well south of the border is Amtrak's Thruway model.

Transport committee  Thank you for that. I think part of the problem at the moment is that the average wannabe passenger can't see that there are services where they want to go. A lot of people don't know that there's any bus service to replace Greyhound. Closing that information gap will help to make the whole thing a lot more sustainable.