Mr. Speaker, my colleague's presentation touched on a couple of points on transportation but the one that leaped out at me was in his closing comments on the Farmer Rail Car Coalition and how this government did not honour the so-called agreement that his government had inked with FRCC in the dying days of the last Parliament.
If the member were to check that out he would find that the cabinet table, consisting of Liberals and so on, had signed off on that initiative but the Privy Council Office had not taken that route. Therefore, there was nothing to honour that this government was forced into.
We took a look at a number of different things that were pertinent to the future of rail transportation, especially in my area on the prairies. Even good Liberals, such as Red Williams and his group, Agrivision, out in western Canada have done an exceptionally good study on the use of container cars as opposed to these bulk cars and saying that is the future and that hopper cars will become obsolete in the very near future.
The Wheat Board has continued to study that initiative and it is saying the same thing. It says that there is a tremendous opportunity for the back haul on a lot of these container cars coming in, especially from the Pacific Rim, China, Japan and so on, and we can be shipping our product back in that, a more specialized way of doing it when we get into the niche and innovative market that is the future for a lot of western Canada.
I am wondering why he would hang us with that 10 year old program that was out of date at that time? Why does he not allow us to move into the future, which containers will give us?