Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to add some of my points of view on this bill.
I already raised my sincere objections to the fact that the House of Commons is seized of an issue that originated in the unelected, undemocratic Senate. Senators have no mandate from the people to introduce legislation. Therefore, this bill itself is illegitimate, in my view.
Legislation should never originate in the other chamber. I raise this point to recognize and pay tribute to someone who has made this point many times in the House of Commons and who also is perhaps the single greatest champion of Canada's rail system. I am referring, Mr. Speaker, to the hon. Bill Blaikie who occupied your seat as a deputy Speaker in the most recent Parliament. Since then, he has become a cabinet minister for the NDP government of the Province of Manitoba.
Bill Blaikie represented an area from which his base of support was predominantly railway workers in and around Symington yard in the neighbourhood of Transcona in the city of Winnipeg. He regularly and faithfully would rise in this House and make the argument that,as a policy objective, Canada should get the freight off the trucks and put it back on the rail where it belongs for any number of good, compelling reasons, and that we should be expanding our railway system and not tearing it up.
I represent the inner city of Winnipeg. Members would not think that would be a big rail community but they would be wrong because the CPR marshalling and intermodal yard is right in the heart of the city of Winnipeg. It was put there in 1882 by terrible urban planning and design. The rail yards being in the middle of Winnipeg has created a tale of two cities where the much-storied north end of Winnipeg is a separate social entity because of the great divide of the CPR marshalling yard that divides our city. Growing up in Winnipeg, the Weston Shops and the CPR yard defined the socio and economic development of our city, so we have very strongly held views about the impact of any rail legislation and the shortfalls of this one.
I have heard speaker after speaker make fairly complimentary noises about the contents of this bill and the need to amend the Railway Safety Act. I know that various incarnations of this bill have shown up in previous Parliaments. However, they are not saying anything about what is most necessary about our rail system and that is not so much a rail safety review but a rail costing review. Prairie farmers are being consistently gouged by the same robber barons that gouged them in the 1920s and 1930s. They are paying approximately 30% more for freight on a tonne of grain than they should be when the rail costing reviews used to control the gouging and the rip-offs of the robber barons of the railroads.
I will tell members what is compelling about rail rationalization. We have these two ribbons of steel going across the country, the CPR and the CNR. Only rarely do they share and co-operate on their tracks. It is imperative that more rail rationalization take place but all we see is tearing up of tracks in rural economy, much to the detriment of small town rural Canada. The rail lines, the spur lines, are being torn up willy-nilly by the thousands of kilometres.
We are trying to get the CPR marshalling yard torn up in the inner city of Winnipeg. We had a town hall meeting. When Lloyd Axworthy was the senior minister and Jean-Luc Pépin was the minister of transportation, we came very close to tearing up those tracks. However, the vice-president of the CPR came to the town hall meeting where we had 200 people, including the mayor, city councillors and senior cabinet ministers, and he said that it would take 12 years to tear up the marshalling yard. A friend of mine, who is an MLA in Manitoba, stood up and said, “You built the entire CPR from Thunder Bay to Victoria in three years in 1880, including blasting your way through the Rocky Mountains and building trellises that defy engineering. You did all that in three years and you're telling us it's going to take you twelve years to tear up a little bit of track in the inner city of Winnipeg. Don't try and sell us that bill of goods”.
There are a number of compelling reasons for the CPR marshalling yard to be torn up. It has been the place of incredible explosions and spills. It is an incredible bottleneck for the whole transportation system across Canada. It was outdated in 1900 and this is 2012. It was put in place 1882.
However, the most compelling reason is that there is significant business case. As Manitoba seeks to take full advantage of its geographic advantage at the heart of the continent, we are creating what will be the largest inland port in North America called centreport. This will be an intermodal port, a state of the art shipping container port. It is not at the ocean, but will in fact take advantage of our geographic location by tearing up the tracks and relocating those to the new centreport. It will be tied in with air, rail and trucking to take the shipping containers, empty them, add value to them and then send them on their way all over the North American market.
