Mr. Speaker, my colleague makes an excellent point. Where I live the rail line now runs from Moosonee to Toronto. It is a dedicated line for freight and passengers as well. It runs through blizzards. When the highway is shut down, trains can still travel, if they are maintained and the lines are kept up. This is an excellent form of transport.
My house sits in front of highway 11, which is the national transportation route for trucking. Many people who have driven it comment that it looks like moose pasture. There are two lanes all the way up basically from North Bay to Nipigon. It is insufficient, given the amount of rock cuts and turns, to be hauling transportation goods along that corridor.
My colleague brings up a really interesting point. It was the Conservative government under the former famous prime minister, Mr. Mulroney, who had pretty much given up on rail transportation. It was so 20th century and it was time to move on. “We do not need a national dream any more; in fact, let us get rid of our national dream and sign on with the Americans. Let us get rid of our national passenger rail service across this country”. That was the pointy headed view of the Conservative Party. It thought that the free market would step in and suddenly there would be all kinds of other transportation.
In the city of Timmins where passenger service was no longer available, the idea was to rip up the tracks because tracks were yesterday's news and a road could be built where the tracks were. For 20 or 30 kilometres coming into the city of Timmins there are no tracks any more. Now we are finding there are some things that were so much easier to transport by rail than by truck.
In many parts of the country the tracks were pulled up because we were told that rail was no longer relevant and truck traffic would cover it and it has not. In many areas where the rail lines were pulled out and where passenger service was let go, there is now a real awareness that this is something we should have been investing in and building because this is what the 21st century economy is moving toward.
In Europe there are high speed trains and in Canada there is a patchwork of services, most of them inadequate for covering great distances. Yet Europe and Japan are moving forward with trains. We have let so much of this lag because, as I said in my speech, there has been no vision for transportation infrastructure in this country.
A laissez-faire attitude in a country the size of ours is simply unacceptable. It is an example, I would suggest, of the fundamental lack of vision we have seen in the Conservative Party throughout its history, whether it was the Avro Arrow, whether it was the shutting down of all the military bases under Mulroney, whether it was the shutting down of the national dream and our passenger service, whether it was killing the Wheat Board today.