Madam Speaker, some weeks ago I asked a question in the House to which the minister of agriculture chose to respond. It had to do with the establishment of branch lines after the change in the Transportation Act that occurred in the House the last year. The protection of branch lines which was intended to last until the end of 1999 simply disappeared.
As a result we have seen at least the CNR post its list of branch lines that will be abandoned. That list is becoming very instructive for communities looking to see what will happen to them if they are living on branch lines.
The point I was trying to make with the government was that we are finding time after time the railways have announced that they will no longer maintain or provide service to branch lines. When community groups or others investigate to see whether or not they should buy them, they find the railway has already achieved an agreement with the elevator companies along the lines to agree they will not sell to anybody attempting to use the elevators and purchase them later.
The point I was trying to make with the minister of agriculture because he represents a seat on the prairies was that the envisioned creation of a whole bunch of short lines will not happen.
We have several actual examples. One is in my riding. It is light rail. A short line could exist if they moved traffic out slowly and they are willing to set up a short line. There is a large alfalfa dehydrating plant at the end of that short line which provides quite a lot of tonnage. To make the short line efficient and effective economically they will also have to continue to haul the grain gathered on those lines.
The two companies that have elevators at three or four points along that line decided to build inland terminals 30 or 40 miles away. They do not want their own gathering outlets competing against the capacity of those inland terminals. They have an agreement which seems to be held by the railway that the line can only be purchased by someone who refuses to move grain on the line. That makes it uneconomical for the community short line to exist.
The minister being a political person decided to make some politics with his answer. He decided to ignore the question completely and say that if there were no short lines in Saskatchewan it would be because of the provincial law.
If he had listened at the short line conference he and I were in attendance at, he would have heard existing short line operators point out that it was not a problem for them at all. They could simply constitute themselves first off as a Canadian corporation and use Canadian successor right laws. In fact the operators already in existence say Saskatchewan successor right laws are not an impediment whatsoever. Their real problem is having the elevator companies stay in existence along those lines.
We are back to the situation we had 100 years ago before we started regulating rail lines and elevator companies, where the elevator companies and the railroads simply have farmers at their mercy.