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INTRODUCTION
The 1999 annual report
presents the state of transportation
in Canada at the turn of the century
The Canada Transportation Act (1996) requires the Minister
of Transport to table a report every year on the state of transportation
in Canada. More specifically, Section 52 of the Act mandates that:
"Each year the Minister shall, before the end of May,
lay before Parliament a report briefly reviewing the state of
transportation in Canada in respect of the preceding year, including:
(a) the financial viability of each mode of transportation
and its contribution to the Canadian economy and the development
of the regions;
(b) the extent to which carriers and modes of transportation
were provided resources, facilities and services at public expenses;
(c) the extent to which carriers and modes of transportation
received compensation, indirectly or directly, for the resources,
facilities and services that were required to be provided as an
imposed public duty; and
(d) any other transportation matters the Minister considers
appropriate."
This report is the fourth one submitted by the Minister. It
gives an overview of transportation in Canada at the turn of the
century, using the most current data and information available.
The report is not constrained by jurisdictional considerations;
instead, its scope is as broad as possible to give a comprehensive
overview of transportation in Canada. Although data availability
was a limiting factor, the report covers up to and including the
year 1999 wherever possible. Where this was not possible, the
most current year for which information was available is reported.
On any given subject, when nothing more current is available than
what was previously reported, the reader is invited to look at
earlier reports on Transport Canada's Web site at: www.tc.gc.ca
The report is more than a review of major transportation events
in Canada in 1999. In a complex and rapidly changing world, events
and non-events are sometimes equally important. Events that were
considered most likely to influence transportation in the new
millennium are addressed more extensively than others are. On
the non-event side, everything was done to ensure that transportation
services on January 1, 2000, would not be affected by the Millennium
Bug. Consequently, from a transportation perspective, Canada's
entry into the new century was an important non-event, as Canadians
continued to benefit from a safe and secure transportation system.
As was the case last year, the content of the report is organized
not by mode of transportation but according to different aspects
of transportation, such as freight and passenger transportation
services, as well as economic, safety, energy and environmental
dimensions. This is intended to give readers different perspectives
on the changes taking place in each mode; it is like looking at
the same picture from different angles.
The structure of this report explicitly recognizes that transportation
demand in Canada is derived from all other social and economic
activities. Consequently, the report starts with a brief overview
of the Canadian economy, which gives an understanding of the forces
at play during 1999. The chapter on government spending gives
a sense of the budgetary attention devoted by governments to the
transportation sector. Government spending and revenues alone,
however, do not provide a complete picture; divestiture, commercialization
and public-private partnership initiatives of recent years also
played a role. Information provided in other chapters of this
report helps to complete the picture.
A number of the following chapters deal with a key subject
and the modal relationship. They examine transportation from a
sustainability perspective and include safety, energy and environment,
regional economies, employment, trade and tourism. This year's
safety chapter focuses on safety statistics, presenting trends
by mode of transportation. Of particular interest in the energy
and environment chapter is a summary of the work of the Transportation
Climate Change Table and its analysis of options to achieve a
progressive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within the transportation
sector.
The chapter on regional economies gives an overview of transportation
by regions. Due to a lack of available data, it was impossible
to isolate the Nunavut Territory for this report. The employment
chapter presents transportation from an employer's perspective.
It covers three specific areas tied to employment: the workforce,
i.e. the total number of people with jobs directly tied to transportation;
the average salary earned by transportation employees; and the
transportation sector's labour relations.
This is followed by two chapters on the role transportation
plays in two activities significant to the country's economic
growth and Canadians' standard of living: trade and tourism. The
trade chapter puts a special emphasis on freight-related activities,
both in terms of flows and modal distribution, while the tourism
chapter takes a broad approach that includes all passenger transportation
activities tied to leisure, business and other purposes.
The next five chapters examine specific elements of the Canadian
transportation system. The chapter on infrastructure gives an
overview of the country's overall transportation infrastructure,
without which transportation services could not be offered. The
focus of the road section of this chapter is on the National Highway
System and recent traffic trends, as nothing more current than
was presented in earlier reports was available on Canada's overall
road network. Incidental services important to the safety and
security of the transportation system, such as the air navigation
system and marine pilotage services, are also addressed in this
chapter. The next three chapters examine transport service industries
from different perspectives: industry structure, freight transportation
and passenger transportation. A final chapter looks at price,
productivity and financial performance of transportation sectors.
The data and information sources used for this report are mostly
external to Transport Canada. The validation of the information
rests first and foremost within the organizations that produce
and generate the information used. Nevertheless, in the production
of this report, as in previous years, special attention was devoted
not only to data quality, but also to data limitations. Numerous
footnotes throughout the report indicate where these limitations
constrained the analyses. As much as possible, when current timely
data was not available, it was not estimated. It is also important
to note that this report analyses the most current state of the
country's transportation system -- it does not try to predict
what may be ahead in coming years.
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