Mr. Speaker, I would say to my hon. friend that I think he is wrong. A lot of this does have to do with deregulation.
I know he does not want to admit it because it would be uncomfortable for him ideologically. This is a trend that the Reform Party, the Liberals and the Conservatives have all been together on: deregulation, privatization. The fact of the matter is this does have a lot to do with it.
A lot of the ways in which the railway is behaving now, particularly with respect to longer trains and these kinds of things has everything to do with making short term quarterly profit margins larger and putting that as a priority against what might be in the public interest.
Even though we agree about the safety problem that longer trains pose, I would have to respectfully disagree with him about what one of the contributing factors is in the creation of these longer trains.
I appreciate the historical lesson from Will Rogers that Canadians were building railways just for the fun of it, but the fact of the matter is these railways were built. They did serve a public purpose, an economic purpose, a social purpose. They did bring the country together. They ought not to be flippantly destroyed in the way that I think much of the infrastructure in western Canada has been destroyed.
This is not a romantic view of the railways. This is a future oriented view of the railways. Sooner or later, and it looks like it is going to be later with these guys, but sooner or later we are going to have to come to the view that railways are the way to go environmentally. If we are going to be dependent on the internal combustion engine, then it should be two or three internal combustion engines pulling a train rather than an army of trucks going down the road clogging up the highways that should be there for the use of ordinary Canadians and their families.