Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to Motion No. 494 this morning. The motion is somewhat redundant, but at the same time it is important to speak to an issue that is fundamentally important to all Canadians; that is, the national transportation system and in particular what takes place when rail rationalization occurs in a country that continues to change, as it normally would in a federation. The needs of the public and the regions of the country are changing as well, so it is important to understand that transportation needs change.
Under Bill C-101 there are a number of clauses that deal with rail abandonment. In particular, the bill deals with the ability to transfer rail. This is a unique change in direction by the Government of Canada. It is a welcome change.
For those of us who have followed the transportation system and the abandonment of lines, under the NTA of 1987 the process that had to be followed for certain lines to be abandoned was that they first had to go to the NTA to prove that the particular line did not have commercial viability. Can you imagine how easy that would be to do if you first of all demarketed the line, which is what they did to start off with.
Most railway companies would not admit this, but when I had the opportunity to chair a special committee that went across the country to look at CN privatization we ran into some documentation that proved that in certain cases high ranking officials in CN sent out memos to their regional management, dictating and explaining to them how to demarket a particular branch line so they could go to the NTA and have them signify that it was not commercially viable and allow them to abandon it.
Bill C-101, and the motion presented by the member this morning suggest a different way of doing business. That is, to acknowledge that transportation companies are no different from any other business in Canada and that you cannot force them to deal with what governments are dealing with every day, and that is the public interest, when in fact transportation companies are more interested in the bottom line. If you force them to try to maintain a particular line without compensating them in a manner that would help the company to be successful, they will go about it in one fashion or another to make sure those lines do get abandoned.
Public policy and public interest are a very important portion of this bill. The critics who look at it are continuing to say that the government is getting out of the public interest business in transportation, but we are putting it where it belongs. Public interest is being taken out of the hands of every day companies in the transportation sector and put back in the hands of the politicians, to make decisions whether they want to subsidize certain lines in this country and whether for regional purposes they want to maintain certain branch lines. Those particular public interest initiatives and policies will have to be put back in the hands of cabinet and parliamentarians if we are going to have a private sector transportation system that works.
In the member's presentation to the House this morning he talked about time frames. It is important to talk about time frames because there is a perception left by the member that the government is not serious about short line railways becoming a new phenomenon in Canada, that it is just lip service and more than
likely most of these lines will be abandoned because of the time frame.
I totally disagree with the member, as is unfortunately usually the case. The time frame for sale of a line starts with the unique process in the bill of forcing the railways, through clause 141, to put forward a three-year plan that is available to anyone, including ourselves as members of Parliament. Can you believe that? They are going to let us see something for a change. In that three-year plan they will signify whether they want to continue a particular line or whether they are interested in selling it or if they cannot sell it whether they will eventually abandon it.
That three-year plan, which the governments have asked the railways to table on a regular basis and to revamp whenever necessary, will give members of Parliament and the public an opportunity to review just what lines are not in the best interest of a private corporation's business plan.
The next process is the intent of any individual municipality, any regional government, whoever is interested in owning a particular line that the other railways do not want to own. They will have 60 days to signify interest in that particular line. Within 60 days all they have to do is write a letter to CP or CN or any other corporation that owns a railway and say they would like to look at purchasing that particular piece of track. Then the 60 days will be allowed to elapse. When that elapses, they have five months after the 60 days to sit down and negotiate the sale of that line to that individual, that municipality, that provincial government.
As can be seen, 60 days is two months and after that is the five-month negotiation process, which gives seven months minimum. Of course if the negotiation is a serious one and both parties are moving along in their negotiations, I am quite sure the railways would be interested in an extension, because it is not in a railways' interest to abandon a line if they do not have to. If they can get an agreement with an individual to run a line to bring a particular shipment of goods from a particular corporation at the end of the line, which is the reason the railway is there, and get it down to the other end, certainly they would do so.
I want to emphasize this. In clauses 141 and then 143 to 145 it lays out very specifically how these rail lines would be transferred from one corporation to the next. In the final analysis, if nobody is interested, be it the Quebec government, a municipality in Quebec, or a private sector individual, why would you want to force a corporation like CP or CN to run a line that absolutely nobody else would like to run? Quite frankly, I think it would have a right to abandon that line.
I want to emphasize that the real issue is not whether a piece of track is torn up, it is what is done with the right of way. That is the real issue in the long term. One of the problems the U.S. is having with the Staggers Act and the changes in policy it made for line abandonment is that when it abandons a line it does not look after the right of way but sells it to the private sector. Depending on where that land is, it is chopped up for residential lots and things like that. That land cannot be re-acquired 20 years from now without expropriation.
One of the main issues that is going to face us as we rationalize our railway system is what do we do with that right of way when we tear the track up and pull it out there. That is all salvage value, which is fine, but if we keep that particular right of way we can always put the track back at some future date. Most people do not see the significance of that right of way.
In southern Ontario, for example, that is a major issue, because most of that land is privately owned outside of that right of way. Once the private sector gets hold of it we are never going to get it back. Governments, in particular provincial and municipal, have a very important role to play on that issue. It is not a federal government jurisdiction. I think it is a provincial jurisdiction. That is where the member should be focusing his attention. That is the mistake that was made in the Staggers Act. Some companies in the U.S. wish they had not sold the right of way but kept it for future use and land banked it.
Powers in this place rest in a number of ways and in a number of fashions. The Minister of Transport in this bill still has the power to subsidize branch lines. He still has the power to subsidize certain rail lines. I will use just one rail line as an example, which is close to my home.
There is a line that runs all the way up to Churchill. It is a very important line to northern Manitoba for regional development. The line could be abandoned tomorrow if it were dealt with in dollars and cents, because it does not make a profit. However, that line is important in the long term to the viability of northern Manitoba. I would suggest that if the people of northern Manitoba, the municipalities that exist there and the shippers on that line were really interested in regional development and if the federal government would enter into a co-operative arrangement with them, someone else who is interested in it could run that line. Maybe they can make it closer to being profitable than it is now. At the same time, it is very transparent that we are subsidizing a line that does not make money because of regional development needs.
That is where the public interest should lie, in a transparent fashion. Whether we want to subsidize a losing operation is a different story. However, forcing railways to carry losing lines is not the way to go about the business of running a corporation, whether it be private or public. I differ with many people on that argument.
I hope the member who has brought this motion forward, as has been mentioned by the Reform Party, spends less time trying to break up Canada and more time in the committee. He will realize there are some very good parts to this bill. At the same time if he supports it he will find there are some good entrepreneurs in Quebec who would love to run a railway and who could run it a lot better than CN or CP ever did.