Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to rise in debate on this private member's motion. Indeed I wish it were votable as well.
I would like to assure the hon. member who just spoke that I am not here to criticize the appointment of Mr. Justice Willard Estey. The point I want to make is that this has come far too late.
We have had a disease hit western Canada which obviously this government is not aware of. It is a disease called terminalization. This terminalization has us in a situation that is changing the western grain transportation movement so quickly that the appointment of the hon. Mr. Justice Estey may be redundant.
In the motion by the hon. member for Souris—Brandon there is one word that is key in the debate, that in the opinion of this House the government should immediately conduct a review with the participation of all stakeholders.
Up to this time, I want to assure this House, that the most important stakeholders, the most numerous stakeholders, the stakeholders whose livelihoods depend on it have not been consulted by the railways. They have not been consulted by this government and they have not been consulted by the grain companies.
The farmers in western Canada today feel they have been betrayed wholesale. In May, during the campaign, we had the three members of this government move a public inquiry as to what was happening.
At that time I said that the inquiry would never take place. It did not. It moved on until July. A joint statement by three members, as the member alluded to, said that things were going to go well.
I want people in this House to think for one moment. I have a constituency right now where there is an oil boom. Still the majority of people are dependent on agriculture for a living.
In light of what my colleague from Souris—Brandon had to say, if something is not done very drastically within the next two years, and I will be coming to this a little later, I will have farmers attempting to get the grain to market not 100 kilometres but 100 miles.
Those people are out of business. Mr. Justice Estey will find that it has gone too far, too fast and we have people who can no longer live in the land. I have examined several of my constituents' grain bills. Now almost half the total cost of grain is in transportation alone. It is a dreadful thing. Nowhere else in Canada does agriculture face this type of transportation cost.
I want to inform the minister and members of this House what has happened. I have a formula from a paper in western Canada: deregulation minus competition equals a monopoly. Let me take a moment to explain how that monopoly has taken place.
In Saskatchewan all the CN lines were traded to CP and CN went to northern Saskatchewan. The CP branch lines to northern Saskatchewan came to southern Saskatchewan and created a mammoth monopoly. That is what is existing at the present time.
I do not really think the transport minister, the agriculture minister and the sole government member in charge of the wheat board are even aware this monopoly has been created on the prairies. It is a zero plus for any western farmer today. That is what has happened.
I want to talk a little about the situation that the chief justice finds himself in.
I know the railways are not happy with me but the producers are, and they are the ones who count. For the last five years they have been meeting behind closed doors and they themselves are establishing a monopoly. We have CN to the north, no competition, and CP to the south, no competition. The grain companies have decided where they are going to put the various terminals. Even the producer will not have an option as to who buys the grain.
Talk about living under a regime. They do not have an option to where they haul their grain and they do not have an option under the Canadian Wheat Board as to how the grain is to be sold. They have developed a very serious thing in the prairies.
I would like to provide information which I think is very important. The Reform Party proposes that a moratorium be legislated on the abandonment branch lines west of the city of Winnipeg. What is the hurry? The branch lines are there. They are in top shape. The elevator houses are there. Let us slow down for a moment until we get some sense of the disease which I have referred to as terminalization.
Under section 43 of the Canada Transportation Act, they should be protected from dismantlement for not less than three years to allow time to investigate and develop the short line proposals. We have moved too far, too fast and if we continue to move at the current rate we can forget about any short line proposals. It is reaching the point where it is case closed. We will have to live with the results of not the shareholders but the railways and the grain companies. The producer is going to suffer the consequence of the government's sitting by and allowing this monopoly to develop.
Both CN and CP are issuing notices of discontinuance of rail lines on a piecemeal basis. If this happens I will have no railways in the western half of my constituency operational by the year 2000. Not one. Everything is going to be wiped out. In doing so, most of the subdivisions are available for sale and would not be viable for stand alone short lines because of the railway abandonments. There is no place for them to haul.
There is a cartoon in the paper showing a main line going but all the branch lines coming into the main line being cut. Short lines are out. The monopoly of the railways and the monopoly of the grain companies is already taken place. Most of the branch lines are at risk in Saskatchewan.
The hon. member from Souris Brandon alluded to this, but I want to say that no place is it more evident than in Saskatchewan that the public road system is in absolute shambles. There is tactic alliance between the railways and the grain companies to eliminate the branch lines as quickly as possible and concentrate grain facilities in high capacity main line terminals. That in itself would not be bad if the farmers, the real stakeholders, had a voice in this.
The absence of railway competition in western Canada negates the argument that controlling the abandonment process will interfere with the free market. What a joke. There is no free market. Surely the people of Canada, particularly of eastern Canada, recognize that for the farmers in western Canada there is no free market.
Large scale farming in western Canada would not have developed without the historical past, right or wrong, of money being injected into the railways.
With the time I have left I want to point out something this government should be aware of. The amount of energy that will be used to get the grain to a terminal has already been measured as between three to eight times the amount of emissions going through the air as it would by rail traffic. I believe every word of all those reports. It has to be more polluting to haul grain to terminals via roads that do not exist.
At least half the villages in my constituency have totally disappeared in the last 30 years. In some places there is not even the old store or an elevator or even a post office or even postal boxes to indicate where the towns had been. The remaining small towns have stabilized and are providing essential services in the west. But many of these communities will disappear as we continue the wholesale abandonment and betrayal of the western Canadian farmer.