Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Winnipeg North for her interest and concern in this issue. I was looking at a play that was written recently by a friend of mine. Bruce McManus wrote Selkirk Avenue, a quite well-known work. Two babushka-wearing Polish grandmas are talking on Selkirk Avenue in the riding of my colleague from Winnipeg North. One asks, “What are you doing today?” The other points at the Arlington Street Bridge and says, “I go to Canada. I go over the bridge to Eaton's today. I am going to Canada”. That is how dramatic the divide is that has developed in my city of Winnipeg, because in 1882 it was decided to run the tracks right down the centre of Winnipeg and cause that great social and cultural divide.
From an urban planning point of view, my colleague is exactly right. There is a host of good reasons to tear up the tracks. There have been spills, derailments and explosions many times over the years. There has been contamination and environmental degradation. It has been an ongoing challenge to build and maintain bridges, overpasses and underpasses to go over and around these huge yards. And they are huge, we are talking hundreds and hundreds of acres of rail yards.
Finally, we desperately need the land for new housing, more green space, more recreation space. We want to use that land in the inner city of Winnipeg properly and not have it as an industrial blight. I have no objection to industry or development, but there are appropriate places for that kind of development, and the heart and soul, the core of our city is not the place.
The report that my colleague made reference to, commissioned by the Minister of International Trade, opens the door. It was finished in May 2007. I am wondering why it was only released a couple of days ago. I personally have approached the minister twice asking him for copies of it because we are all waiting for it. It is what opens the door for us and contemplates clearly a series of inland ports to accommodate this massive flow that we contemplate of shipping containers from all around the world converging, I hope, at the hub of North America, the very heart and soul of the continent, which is Winnipeg, Manitoba.
These container terminals are an awesome thing to see when they are well designed. If someone is trying to find a container with furniture from his factory, it might be 200 rows down and 100 rows over and up high. A computerized gantry will go and find it, pick it out and deliver it to him, so that no train and no ship is waiting more than 24 hours to offload or to reload.
That is the kind of vision we have to have if we are serious about attracting attention and being this distribution network. The railways will pick up freight and drop off freight if they do not get bottlenecked in a downtown core. If they can get in and out in 24 hours and pick up revenue, then they will come. Build it and they will come.
It is just a dream. It is just a vision. But it is exciting people because we are talking about the revitalization of the inner city on a scale--