Mr. Speaker, I feel somewhat badly following the hon. member who made an eloquent defence of VIA Rail and an eloquent defence of committees of the House, except I have to beg to differ as to what we should do about it.
It seems to me that those of us who want to defend passenger rail Canada and defend the role of VIA Rail should be the people who are least inclined to support a reduction in the funding for VIA Rail. The member might see it differently, and people of goodwill can disagree as to what the best way of dealing with this is.
I and the NDP take a different view on this. Because we support passenger rail and because we are not of the same mind as the Alliance members, who think there is something evil about VIA Rail because it is publicly owned, we cannot see our way to supporting even a committee decision that calls for a reduction in funding for VIA Rail.
I also want to point out that the decision of the committee, although it is portrayed as unanimous, was not unanimous in the sense that the NDP member on the committee was not present for that vote. Had she been present, it would not have been unanimous. That is one of the reasons why we are here tonight. We want to make it clear that we did not support the decision by committee to pass a motion to reduce the VIA Rail budget by $9 million.
I find this somewhat uncomfortable because I have often argued in the House, and I make no bones about it, that decisions of committees should be more respected than they are. We all know we do not always agree with every committee recommendation that comes forward, and we need to be honest about that. I am sure some of the people in the Alliance, who were making the argument about respecting the judgment of committees a few minutes ago, are probably not making the same argument with respect to the decision that was taken by the justice committee this afternoon. They probably will not get up in the House tomorrow and ask the government to respect the decision of the justice committee in the same way they now ask the government to respect the decision of the transport committee. It all depends on whether one agrees or not, although overall I would still argue that more respect should be paid to the decisions of committees.
I listened with interest to my Conservative friend and I would agree that Doug Young is certainly a villain when it comes, not just to passenger rail but to rail in general. I think particularly of the privatization of CNR.
The darkest day that I remember for VIA Rail did not come under the transport ministry of Doug Young. It came under the leadership of Brian Mulroney in the fall of 1989 with a decision that was implemented on January 15, 1990, which was the biggest single decimation of VIA Rail that we had ever seen in this country.
For the member to get up and talk as if everything was just hunky-dory until 1993, I am sorry. I was not going to talk about this, but I have been provoked by the very selective memory of the member from New Brunswick who seems to think that between 1984 and 1993 there was no damage done to VIA Rail. In fact in the fall of 1989 I was at the transport committee when that announcement was made by Ron Lawless. On January 15, 1990 the then transport minister Benoît Bouchard also should have gone down on the list of villains, when it comes to the history of rail in this country.