Mr. Speaker, I listened with a great deal of interest to the remarks of my colleague opposite. I appreciated his interesting list of successful conveyances of short line railways to private companies.
I would like to point out that before we make decisions on rail line abandonments with the approval of the government or the National Transportation Agency, a serious examination is in order because that kind of conveyance has negative legal and social consequences on employees despite all that can be said.
That is why our party has asked for a moratorium on rail line abandonments. There is no overall plan to reorganize the railway system, and we blame the government for it. There is no plan on which to base decisions to approve or reject requests for rail line abandonments and branch line removals by CP and CN.
We ask for a moratorium so we can examine the whole issue. We agree that companies may not be able to keep some lines that no private company can take over because they would not be viable. It should be pointed out, though, that the lack of viability is sometimes the result of extremely poor service, in which case we should take a look at what caused the problem in the first place. Is the lack of business actually the result of bad service that companies keep that way on purpose, to be able to ask for abandonment?
That leads me to questions concerning workers. Apparently, certain groups in transportation companies have more privileges than others. I did not go through their collective agreements, but we should enquire about the spending structure of CN when it says those privileges should be reduced. For example, CN set up a rating centre in Montreal, and, after spending a few million dollars to set it up in Montreal, it decided to transfer it out west.
This morning, my colleague, who is deputy chairman of the transport committee, mentioned a shocking case of exceptional perks granted to an executive. We should scrutinize all those things before we decide that there are cases of abuse, and that lines should be conveyed to private companies to alleviate the pressure of wages.
That brings me to the broader issue of-