I can say that after listening to the Minister of Transport, there is one point on which I agree: if our current railway network corresponds to the national dream, that dream is pretty obsolete.
After listening to his speech, I concluded that the Minister of Transport had become a subsidiary of Treasury Board, because he told us basically that we had to cut costs and raise fares. I expected some vision of the future.
He told us that if there was a merger between CN and CP, they would examine it. But why does the minister not make a merger mandatory and provide clear guidelines on maintaining essential services, cutting costs and making railway services competitive?
Why is the minister waiting for CN and CP to come up with proposals, when today we are told this will take at least another year. Meanwhile, they will sell off assets. A lot of this property is on railway lines, and major assets will be transferred to real estate subsidiaries of these companies. These assets are now worth a lot of money and were probably acquired for a song, with government assistance.
There is another matter that is even more important for the future of this country, and the Minister of Transport did not even bother to mention it. The high-speed train project for the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, a project for the future, a project based on new technologies that will be able to meet both transportation requirements of a billion dollar North American market for new technologies, and would you believe, Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Transport did not say a word about this project?
Could the Minister of Transport perhaps give us some idea of what the prospects are for the future?