Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on a question I asked of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport a few weeks ago regarding, of all things, the future of passenger rail in Canada and particularly along the Windsor to Quebec corridor.
The people in my riding spoke out very vociferously against the cuts in 1990. Now they find themselves in a position in which their limited but very important passenger rail service is yet again in jeopardy.
Just by way of interest, the other day I was down on the platform in Brantford and saw 40 men and women prepared to board the train to Toronto and points eastward. There were men and women on their way to work in the city of Toronto and young adults on their way to university in Toronto. Seniors find the train service very accommodating and easy to access, and there were two going into the city to visit with medical specialists, friends and neighbours, and to go to the theatre. As well there were two families that had been visiting in southwestern Ontario and were on their way home to Quebec City.
As the parliamentary secretary knows, the line that runs between London and Brantford and goes on to Toronto is the least subsidized of all the VIA lines. I cannot see that it would make any sense to further cut the service along that section of the corridor.
Beyond that I would like to say I have listened to the parliamentary secretary and the minister talk about how they view VIA's initiatives in terms of managing continued federal government funding cuts, that they will be looking at managerial restructuring and efficiencies, that they will be working to upgrade, modify and update their very outdated labour contracts, and finally that they will be rationalizing unused infrastructure.
I would say to the government that it must insist VIA is successful in all three of these approaches. Beyond that I would like to suggest and believe that the government should prepare a comprehensive multimodal transportation strategy for Canada that would include an individual comprehensive mandate for VIA setting out its mission, its roles, its goals and the expectations by which its success can be measured.
I think in that mandate it will become clear to us that in places like southwestern Ontario the VIA infrastructure is most commonly used as a commuter service. I am not sure that I as a member from southwestern Ontario feel comfortable asking the rest of Canada to support that specific use of the infrastructure, just as I expect those in Alberta are necessarily anxious to ask those of us in Ontario and further east to support the VIA service to help them build their tourist industry.
While we as a national government should continue to support this very important passenger rail infrastructure, we should also encourage VIA to work very closely with our provincial counterparts to ensure that the use of the infrastructure is effective and very useful to the particular region in mind.
These are important things our government could do. In fact debate should be held in the House of Commons and a loud and clear direction should be given to VIA to be again a successful and useful mode of passenger rail transportation in the country.