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INTRODUCTION

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.