Madam Speaker, I would like to put a question to my colleague from the Reform Party on the part of his speech which focuses on short lines.
It is not frequent for a member of my party to agree with a member of the Reform Party, so I did not want it to go unnoticed. It so happens that my honourable colleague rightly says that the bill does not give enough support to small businesses which intend to take over parts of the lines the big companies wish to abandon. He also says that these small businesses can manage the lines as well as the big companies.
I would even go further. Often times, they can manage them better because they succeed where the big companies have failed and, as the minister himself said this morning, in the United States, it is these short lines that truly saved the American network. Just like small streams feed big rivers, short lines feed larger ones.
Our party was suggesting two things to help the SLRs. First, we suggested that loans be given to small companies so they could rehabilitate the lines. As the hon. member probably knows, the big companies did not maintain short lines hoping that the service would deteriorate and that as a consequence people would stop using them which, in turn, allowed them to ask that the lines be abandoned. Today, when the National Transportation Agency authorizes a company to abandon a branch line, we can find buyers for that line but it is usually a small company which is not strong enough or does not have the money necessary to rehabilitate the line that was deliberately neglected.
I would like to ask my colleague what he thinks of our two suggestions which are: First, to give interest-free loans to small companies that want to buy branch lines, provided they rehabilitate those lines; and second, that the federal government creates its own branch line rehabilitation program since it is responsible for the present state of those lines.
What does the hon. member think of our suggestions? Does he himself have suggestions to help SLRs?