Mr. Speaker, I want to express my appreciation to my colleague for his well thought out speech and the positions that he takes. Transportation is a difficult portfolio to handle because it is as wide and varied as is agriculture, for example. However, when transportation and agriculture are combined, sometimes the results are fairly interesting.
I want to talk a little about the project underway in western Canada right now. The government has made a decision that it will sell its 12,000 hopper rail cars. Over the years, there has been a push by farmers to get control of these cars. The taxpayers already have paid for them once, but farmers want to get control of them.
Early on in the project, which is almost 10 years ago now, there was a discussion about the fact that there would be lower freight rates for farmers and that farmers would be able to save money through this project. It has been interesting, as the project has developed, it seems the idea that farmers are going to save money has disappeared from the formula. Now when Farmer Rail Coalition is talking about the rail cars, there is no longer the statement being made that farmers are going to save a lot of money, and that is of concern to some of us.
As the commitment to saving farmers money has disappeared, what has reappeared is Liberal connections within the project. Last week the government announced that it was moving ahead with this project and it was going to be turning it over to a group in western Canada. It seemed that the government was doing this as another election promise. We saw $23 billion in 23 days, and this was part of that billion dollar a day spending program.
It is interesting that the finance minister's campaign co-chair for Saskatchewan has been involved in the project from the beginning. Last Friday we rose in the House during question period and asked the finance minister if he could tell us how much his campaign manager had received from the project. He could not do that or he refused to do that.
Does the member find that this political interference and appearance of rewarding people politically is found in other segments of the transportation segments in Canada?