Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let’s try to make the best possible use of our time today.
Basically, the testimony we have heard so far has reported what we already knew about the new VIA Rail trains in the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, namely that the trains procured to serve the corridor break down regularly, if not all the time, when it gets a little cold in winter.
The worst thing is that to renew its fleet of 32 trainsets for the Quebec City-Windsor corridor in 2018, the Liberals chose to award the contract to a foreign entity. They decided that the trainsets would be made in California instead of awarding the contract to our community of Saint‑Bruno and La Pocatière. That’s a loss of $1 billion for our community. Our fellow citizens could have worked on that project. My assumption is that these trains would have worked in winter had they been made in Canada. In Quebec, winter is at the heart of daily life.
A column by Mr. Julien Arsenault in Le Devoir on January 29 stated that VIA Rail does not seem to have learned from its mistakes, and neither has the government, because despite the Liberal Buy Canadian rhetoric and politics, government members are planning to do the exact same thing a second time, meaning they will potentially let this contract go to a company abroad and leave our community penniless in the middle of a tariff war.
With this in mind, I would like to move the following motion:
That the committee request that the Department of Transport ensure that VIA Rail procure its rolling stock from manufacturers established in Canada for the renewal of its fleet, in accordance with the federal Buy Canadian Policy, in order to support the maintenance and development of domestic jobs and industrial capacity.