Ontario-Québec Trade Corridor and Continental Gateway “A safe, sustainable and competitive Gateway”

A multimodal transportation system developed and integrated to the rest of North America is essential to support Québec and Ontario trade as much with the United States as with the rest of the World. Despite the good performance of this transportation system, Québec, Ontario and Canada will have to rely on a structured and performing system in order to remain competitive in the future. In July 2007, the governments of Canada, Ontario and Québec signed a Memorandum of Understanding stating the framework of a federalprovincial collaboration for the development of the Ontario-Québec Trade Corridor and Continental Gateway in partnership with the public and private sectors. The objective of this Memorandum of Understanding is to establish the Québec-Ontario Trade Corridor and Continental Gateway as a transport system that is strategic, integrated and competitive on a global scale in support of international trade and domestic exchanges supporting foreign trade. The global objective of this tripartite planning initiative is the elaboration and implementation of a global strategy for the short, medium and long term. This will allow a better integration of transportation systems while improving their effectiveness, safety and sustainability. This initiative is comprised in a Canadian initiative for gateways and trade corridors, the two other gateways being the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative and the Atlantic Gateway. The goal of this communication is to go over the Gateway’s objectives and make a quick assessment of results from the infrastructure studies and workgroup activities on non-infrastructure issues (policies, regulations and operations). The analyses, studies and workgroups allowed amongst other things an evaluation of transportation demand and the identification of actual and future capacity problems as well as problems with regard to policies, regulations and operations. Some of these issues will be presented. These results will be used for the elaboration of a strategy that should be made public in the fall of 2009 with the objective of identifying measures allowing the optimisation of the multimodal transportation system in support of international trade. Hence this communication will deal with the elaboration framework, the main issues and main Strategy components. It may also discuss more specifically some elements of the Strategy with respect to progress made.