Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate the dual questions of the member.
I'll answer the first one: Is a multimodal study more appropriate than a bus study? Yes, absolutely. The reason is that this study has to merge with a strategy, and the strategy has to be very clear on the questions previously asked: Who do we want to move, how many Canadians do we want to move, where do we want to move them, at what cost and how fast?
That's it. We have to answer those questions, and we won't be able to answer them and say we want to move all Canadians everywhere all the time at any cost. The answer has to be that we want to move some Canadians from some places at some times, at a certain cost and at a certain speed, because there are finite resources out there.
Layering on top of that, obviously, are the issues that have been raised by my colleagues of who the most vulnerable are and who the most in need are. They should drive the answers to those questions, but those questions have to be answered. If we leave it ambiguous and omnibus, we will continue to have a 19th century transportation system heading into the 22nd century.
That's the first answer: It should be multimodal. The assumption underlying this is that both public and private providers have a role to play there, because there is money to be made on all sides of that equation with the clientele we have. The clientele we have is 36 million or 37 million Canadians, at last head count, plus a few hundred thousand immigrants every year.
That's our clientele, and it's structured in about five large cities in this country, with a smattering of smaller rural communities that are not connected today. That's the marketplace we're dealing with, so we need those answers. Who do we want to move? How many Canadians? Where and at what cost, and how fast between those marketplaces? These are the logistics of passengers and clientele movement issues. It is no different from the freight matter that you referred to. It is about moving people in the limited capacity of the system that we have today and incrementally growing it.
Therefore, I would say, as a second component to the first question about a multimodal study, that it is insufficient for the multimodal study to be a national strategy only. It does have to be a CUSMA study, for the same reason that when we talk about electrification and the use of hydrogen, it's not enough for CP and CN to find some hydrogen on either side of the country. They need a North American solution. Moving Canadians east to west and north to south does include integrating Canadians with the hubs in Seattle and New York and across the North American barrier, so this study has to have some integration capacity, at least in the big centres of Vancouver and Toronto.
That's the answer to the first question. Within that, of course, are the private providers of not only coaching and shuttle services but also the on-demand services.
The answer to the second question on the data is twofold.
Number one, identify the clientele. As a case study, it was only a couple of years ago that Via Rail started identifying your profile. Air Canada has known all about you for years. Aeroplan has known all about you. Air Miles knows all about you. Via only just started to know about you.
Anybody who has run a business knows that you need to know your customers. We don't know anything about our customers, and that's not just Via. Public transit collects almost no data about its customers and clientele. How do we treat customers, therefore? Like a kick in the pants, because they're not treated as customers; they're treated as obligatory servants of a welfare system. That is no good and cannot proceed forward.
The first issue of data is to identify the clientele so that we know what the clientele wants. Where are they going? Who are they? What are their demographics? What is their profile from an income perspective? That data can be incorporated into this study, because data can be collected at every point of contact: the app that I download, the ticket I buy, the ride I take. I can consent to handing over my data in exchange for a better service. That has to happen across those multi-modes.
The second side of it is very business oriented. Whether it's publicly subsidized or not, those data allow for performance measures. They allow us to identify how many people are moving, how far, how fast and at what cost, and whether the service we are subsidizing is performing at the measures we expect it to perform at.