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North America paying attention to Canada and considering visiting, but they may be deterred by the difficultly in bringing a vehicle overseas. Not needing a vehicle to get around will be the critical push for many to visit during and after the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.

Implementing universally free transit by 2010 would also show that Canada truly is serious about being an environmental leader in a tangible, significant, and effective way, and show it when there are more than two billion people watching events in Canada.

If mass transit in Canada were free for everyone, ridership would explode. Each year more people would take transit than the last year, thus justifying an increase in service and therefore attracting more people onto the buses and out of their cars. With this kind of feedback loop, it is feasible that between 50 and 70 percent of Canadians in cities of 20,000 people or more would choose to use mass transit as their primary transportation.

Consider the difference in carbon emissions this would make. A diesel-using bus (let alone hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell, and electric buses) with a typical 15 riders uses less than a third as much fuel as 15 typical cars. If 50 percent of Canadians ride instead of drive, this results in a reduction of at least a third of all transportation emissions from a single program.

Providing transportation for ten million commuters may seem prohibitively expensive, but in less than a decade the program would pay for itself. According to Statistics Canada, 40 billion liters of gasoline were used in Canada in 2004 (Sales). A reduction of a third makes a savings of more than 13 billion liters, which can be sold to the United States and yielding an annual boost in trade surplus of more than 9 billion US dollars by the retail value of gasoline in the United States in December 2007.

A reduction of a third of transportation emissions makes mandated carbon caps a moot point, the carbon reduction of that many people using transit is so large that reaching emissions targets becomes almost trivial. Canada's contribution to fighting climate would be better than the target contributions of the United Nations.

According to Natural Resources Canada, Canadians "produce half of their annual five tonnes [of greenhouse gas emissions]... from driving."(Fuel), so a reduction of driving emissions by a third is a reduction of all carbon emissions by a sixth. This is a greater improvement than any single program has been able to create so

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