Mr. Speaker, I am not going to ask you for any extra time or for anything over 10 minutes. As a matter of fact I may not even speak for five minutes.
I have noticed a certain ambivalence on the benches opposite toward this privatization bill. Clearly privatization is not something you do just to do it. It is done for a reason. The reason is to try to put a crown corporation in a position where it becomes an efficient money making organization.
The hon. member for London East has spoken on several occasions about the fact we must not apply constraints to the company after it is privatized. If we do that we defeat our purpose. One of the constraints the government is proposing to apply is to maintain the Official Languages Act for this private corporation. The Official Languages Act is intended for government organizations.
If CN has to maintain the extra cost and the extra inefficiencies of having the hand of the official languages commissioner on the throttle of every locomotive, it is not going to be as competitive as it needs to be. It is unnecessary. Most of CN's operations are west of the lakehead. There is very little French spoken by either the employees or by the customers.
There will certainly be circumstances in any company working in Canada where it will want to maintain the use of two languages voluntarily.
I worked from time to time in mines or other work sites where workers spoke two or even three different languages. We had to use these languages correctly for the sake of efficiency or safety, but never for political reasons. That is sensible bilingualism. It is not always necessary to impose rules for everything.
I would like to speak even more briefly on Motion No. 14. Again, we have an example of an attempt by government to maintain control over the corporation after it is privatized. No one but the management of a company should be in a position to decide what bridges it is going to maintain, what tracks it is going to maintain.
This is something that is not done if the government really means what it says about making the thing run properly. It does not allow bureaucrats or politicians to stick their cotton pickin' hands into the operations of a private company. If it does that, it may as well forget about privatizing the company, just keep on dictating to it. Government cannot have it both ways.
Either the company is going to be private or it is going to continue to be a semi-crown. I strongly agree with the proposal to privatize it.
On the last motion, the question proposed by the hon. members of the Bloc to simplify the regulatory regime, to give the provinces more regulatory powers and the federal government less, in principle I agree with that but this is neither the time nor the place to debate that question.
It certainly should not be written into the bill. With that, I have had my five minutes.