Madam Speaker, I might say just by way of beginning that it is interesting to notice how the members of the Bloc Quebecois are using every opportunity in the House of Commons to make the point about why they think their fellow citizens in Quebec should vote yes in the coming referendum. I was interested in question period today when they were going on and on about alleged injustices to Quebec. It struck me that if the people of Quebec vote yes they are going to have a heck of a lot less of what the Bloc Quebecois were complaining they were not getting enough of.
The same of course is true with respect to transportation matters. I heard people in the Bloc refer today to the privatization of CN. I think I can say with some certainty that if there is a yes vote in Quebec the provision in Bill C-89 guaranteeing that the headquarters of this new privatized CN will be in Montreal will not continue very long past a yes vote. At least if I have anything to do with it, it will not. I would imagine that would be true for a lot of western Canadians, particularly people I represent, who from the very beginning felt that if CN was to be restructured in such a radical way, the headquarters of CN should be in western Canada, in particular in Winnipeg, because most of the traffic this new privatized CN will be directing will be in western Canada. This is just by way of making that point to the Bloc.
There are two things I want to get on the record with respect to Bill C-101. First, I do not think I have to tell anyone in the House that I am in general opposed to the overall agenda of the government with respect to Bill C-101, the privatization of CN, the deregulation of the transportation system in this country, going back to fights we had in this House against the former transport minister, Don Mazankowski, and going back before that.
Sometimes people tend to forget, in particular people in Winnipeg, that this deregulation business really started under a former Liberal Minister of Transport, who is now the Minister of Human Resources Development. There is a tendency to blame the origins of this agenda on the Conservatives when in fact it goes back beyond that to this fascination the then Minister of Transport, the member for Winnipeg South Centre, had with deregulation at that time, prior to the defeat of the Trudeau government.
I was interested to hear some of the things members said. The point I want to make here, and I do not think it has been made to this point, at least not to my satisfaction, is the process by which we are doing this, if I understand the origins of this procedure by which we refer matters to committee before second reading.
I had a lot to do with parliamentary reform in previous Parliaments and we considered this at one point. The goal of that procedure as it was first imagined was that this would be something that would be applied to bills that were held to be of a non-partisan nature. It would not be something that was available to the government alone. It would be something that could only be done with some kind of agreement in the House and therefore it would be a mechanism whereby parties could say this is a bill we do not really have much to fight about in, so we want to take it into committee and we want to go over the details.
I have noticed something that may be related to the fact that this procedure was adopted, I believe, after the beginning of this new Parliament, when the government only had to deal with rookies on the opposition side in committee. This has now become a procedure that is available to the government whenever it wants to use it, not something that requires a certain amount of co-operation on the part of the opposition. In my judgment, this goes against the spirit of the reform intent. When I say reform I do not mean Reform Party, but reform in the best sense of the word, reform of the House of Commons. This procedure has become a kind of a fast track
procedure. In my judgment, it is not being used for the intention for which it was originally designed.
We have here a massive bill, which represents a major reorientation of the way transportation decisions are made with respect to rail line abandonment, the creation of short line railways, relationships between shippers and the railway companies, a whole host of things, all of which deserve a major second reading debate. We are reconceptualizing the transportation system of the country. We should be having a debate about that, in which I would want to argue very strongly and at length, hopefully being open to questions from colleagues in the House.
Instead we have this very prescribed, circumscribed three-hour debate in which people have only ten-minute speeches, after which the whole thing is whisked off to committee. There is never really any significant debate on the principle of the bill. That is fine if there is agreement to do so and if it is the kind of legislation that lends itself to that procedure.
With respect to my Bloc and Reform colleagues, I think they let the government get away with something when they agreed to move ahead with this kind of procedure. They allowed it to go into the standing orders without the kinds of safeguards that should have been required. That is, there should have been some provision that there had to be opposition agreement in order for this procedure to be followed. I believe their inexperience did not stand them in very good stead in that respect.
I want to register once more my opposition to this bill. My opposition has been longstanding to an agenda of which this bill is the latest stage. I know my Reform colleagues were saying earlier that it does not go far enough, that it should be absolute, utter I suppose, comprehensive, total deregulation. However, I think deregulation has not served this country particularly well. It certainly has not served the transportation system very well. It certainly has not served my constituents very well, those who work at the railway and others, and the economic spin-off that used to exist in Winnipeg as a result of the presence of railway jobs there.
A couple of weeks ago another 266 people were laid off in the CN shops in Transcona. This is a far cry from the kinds of promises that were made during the 1993 election campaign by members opposite about how the many terrible things that were happening under the Tories were going to cease if only a Liberal government were elected: NAFTA would not go through, Winnipeg would be returned to its former glory as a transportation centre, rail jobs would return from Montreal and Edmonton, and no one would ever be laid off again. Well, that is not the way it has turned out. In fact we have a Liberal government doing what no Conservative government ever contemplated in public: privatizing CN Rail and devastating the community I come from.
We see here an intention on the part of the government and the railway together to basically dismantle CN Rail as we have known it and to have basically tracks and trains, that is it. Maintenance, repair, stores, and all kinds of other things the railway used to do for itself will all be contracted out, pieced off here, there, and everywhere. As a result, a lot more good-paying jobs will be lost. In the end, this is also about good-paying jobs. It is not just about railways.
I listened earlier to the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, the government whip, talking about the impediment to short line railways. One of the reasons for successor rights was to make sure that short line railways are not used as a way of union busting, are not used as a way of laying people off and then hiring them back at half of what they used to make. I do not think that is such a bad sentiment. I do not think that is something for which the NDP government in Ontario or anywhere else should have to apologize.
Those good paying jobs are disappearing. I do not think that is good for Canada. It is not good for the middle class, which is being eroded at both ends. It is not good for the revenues of the government. It is part of the reason we have a deficit in this country, because a lot of the good paying jobs are going, and with them is going the ability to pay the kind of income tax that would help pay off the deficit.