Mr. Speaker, the primary purpose of Bill S-7, as my colleague has just reminded us, is to dissolve the Nipissing Railway Company. The request to dissolve the company came from the City of North Bay, within whose limits it owns land, which is therefore unoccupied and not used, since the railway was never built, as it should have been before 1908, the last extension.
One might wonder whether there are still, in Canada, other such pieces of land which are, or have been, unusable for long stretches of time because the government did not think to free them up.
In my riding, in Blainville, in any event, I know of one case. Camp Bouchard, which covers 20 per cent of the municipality, belonged, until a few years ago, to National Defence. The camp had been equipped during the war with the complete infrastructure of a small city, in order to manufacture munitions. All these facilities, which would have made a wonderful industrial park for the city, were scandalously neglected, to such an extent that in the end they had to be dynamited, before the land could be sold back to Blainville, of which I was the mayor. This is another example of federal incompetence like the one before us today.
We owe a vote of thanks to the senator and the member for Nipissing, without whose initiative the government would undoubtedly have taken even longer to realize that there was no reason to continue to hold land for a railway, when 88 years after the deadline for building it had passed, there was no railway in sight.
The Bloc Quebecois is therefore in favour of Bill S-17.
(Motion agreed to, bill read the second time, considered in committee, reported, concurred in, read the third time and passed.)