Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today to speak on Bill C-8, which people will remember was previously Bill C-58 and which is an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act. We are dealing in this case specifically with railway transportation.
I have already regaled the House with the rich history of my family in that I come from a long line of railway magnates. My great-great-grandfather was John P. McNeil. The “P” did not stand for anything. It was just that every man in the village of Iona was named John so they had to distinguish him from his eight brothers whose first names were all John as well. There were John Roderick, John Francis, John Albert, John Alec and John P. They ran out of names because the Scottish only name people after dead people and there just were not that many dead people in the family.
The great John P. McNeil was a porter on the Sydney Flyer. My grandfather told me that the family did not eat at night until John P. came in. It did not matter how late. The kids would wait out in the hallway for John P. to come in. He would sit down and when he had finished eating, he would say, “McNeil has dined”. That meant the children could eat.
That is actually a tradition that goes back to the 1200s and even before that when the McNeils were on the island of Barra. It was a raiding base for the Vikings. The McNeil, who was the clan chieftain, claimed the right to eat before all the lords of the earth. That is an actual historical fact, not that any of my relatives ever lived in the castle. I think they pounded seaweed on the shore for a living and then were sort of unceremoniously removed from their land and sent to Cape Breton, where they had to find work. Some of them went to the coal mines, but John P. worked on the Sydney Flyer.
Mr. Speaker, I know you are waiting for me to get to the punchline, but I think it all adds to the story.
I do not know if John P. had many great skills, but one of his skills was that he could always tell that a bootlegger was coming into Sydney. When they were coming in on the train, he would say, “A man who has a bottle of whisky in his suitcase always puts that suitcase down with just a little more care than if it was just his long johns”.
Of course there was not enough work for all the McNeils, so they had to move to Ontario and work in the mines. The ones who did not want to work in the mines worked on the railway, the great Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. Part of my long, illustrious history is that my uncles, Andy and John, were porters on the T and NO Railway.
My mother tells the story about their travel along that railway from Timmins to North Bay in the summer. They would load up on the car in Timmins with a ticket that would last them as far as Schumacher, which was about two miles down the road. They would have their sleeping bags and coats. Obviously they were going on a long trip. They were always terrified that someone was going to notice that their ticket was for only two miles, not for 250. My uncles knew everybody on the train and used to travel up and down the train line for free to go stay with the aunts.
I know, Mr. Speaker, that you are wondering what this is all leading to. It speaks to my passion and yours. I am very glad that you are in the chair because of your deep love of history and railway. I know that you will give me a little leeway to sort of draw out what exactly the point of this discourse is.
I would like to move forward now to the 1980s and my own interest in the railway. We are talking about the government and its vision for infrastructure. It is putting in all kinds of effort on the gateways and ports but if people ever travel across this country they have to understand that it is not just the gateways, the ports or the megaprojects that make infrastructure work in this country. It is actually being able to connect them to the various places that makes it work, which of course goes back to my family's history on the railway.
The railway plays an important role in connecting. We have seen over the last number of years how much of the railways have been left. In some parts of the country they are being torn up and there are other areas where we have not built the necessary infrastructure.
As I said, I would like to speak about the 1980s, when a famous Scottish band came to Canada. This is a true story, although I know it sounds like a joke. A Scottish band came to Canada. I think it was called Aztec Camera. The band members landed in Halifax at that great port and then flew to Montreal. They played in Montreal and then drove to Ottawa. They left Ottawa and drove along the great highway. When they got to Toronto they thought, “This is what we always thought North America was”. Then they were told, “Your next gig is in Winnipeg. There is the bus. Now drive to Winnipeg”.
About 16 hours up the highway on the way to Winnipeg, a highway consisting of two lanes of traffic, moose every 10 feet, trees and no lights, the road manager looked at the driver, who was Canadian, and asked him if he could not have picked the Trans-Canada Highway to travel across the country. The driver said they were on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Anyone who has driven across this country knows that long, terrible drive through northern Ontario. Northern Ontario is made up of some of the prettiest country in the world, but Highway 11, which I live on, is in a terrible state. It is the truck transportation route for this entire country. If goods have to be moved west to east, they have to be moved along that little strip of moose pasture that runs between the rocks. People in northern Ontario ask why so many trucks need to be on these two lanes of traffic when the rail line is sitting right there and half the time is empty. That is the issue in northern Ontario.
We need to connect the infrastructure of this country so we do not just have great port plans and great transportation links with our major trading partner, the United States. We need a forward looking plan to ensure that goods coming off container ships from the Far East can be transported across this country in an efficient, economical and environmentally friendly way. The train, of course, takes on an important light.
Our role in Parliament is to look at how to improve the transportation networks of this country. Bill C-8 addresses a number of concerns that have been raised by shippers dependent on railway transportation. Over the years shippers have raised many legitimate concerns about how pricing is done on railways and about access to goods.
They also have raised concerns about the duopoly that exists right now with Canadian Pacific and CN and their ability to basically call the shots for anything that is going to be shipped in certain areas of the country. This financial stranglehold has a major effect on competitiveness and trade.
Many people who ship goods, whether they are agricultural products or products being shipped out of a mine's large bulk operations, are very dependent on the prices they receive from CN or CP for the cost of bulk transportation. Under a duopolistic regime, these shippers have very few alternatives to get their products out.
We know that there are 30 federally regulated railways in Canada, but many rail shippers are still captive shippers who are still dealing with these two big players. We need to look at how we ensure fairness in a system that does not have major competition and a system where it is not practical to bring in competition on these lines.
One of the changes we are looking at is a change to ensure a little fairness in pricing and how pricing is done so shippers get a fair deal, whether they are shipping grain or copper concentrates to ports.
The amendments to the Canada Transportation Act in Bill C-8 would help address some of the shipper concerns about rail service and rates that have been raised time and time again while at the same time providing regulatory stability to the railways to encourage needed investments to keep our exporters and importers competitive in international markets. This is key. We really need to ensure that the railway system maintains a sense of strong commitment to invest.
As Canadians, of course, we want to invest in our railways because they do play such a vital role and they always have, the Brian Mulroney regime notwithstanding.
A number of the amendments brought forward in Bill C-8 were actually developed in concert with shippers who brought their concerns to Parliament.
We are looking at the regulatory impact of the bill. One amendment would remove the requirement for a shipper to prove substantial commercial harm before applying to the agency for certain competitive remedies. That is a fair amendment. It is unlikely to be abused because we are talking about long term customers of the railway.
We also need to allow shippers to jointly apply. Right now they can apply only individually for final offers of arbitration on a common matter. If there are disputes, they could be grouped together and thus would not be drawn out. A ruling could be received fairly quickly.
We need to give the agency the authority to establish charges or the associated terms and conditions that would apply to shippers for the movement of traffic or incidental services.
This also will allow for the suspension of any final offer arbitration process if both parties consent to pursue mediation.
Again, these are reasonable requests that are being brought forward to actually help address these longstanding concerns.
It would also permit the CTA upon the complaint of a shipper to investigate charges and conditions for incidental services and those related to the movement of traffic contained in a tariff that are of general application and establish new charges or terms and conditions if it finds those in the tariff to be unreasonable.
Once again, I think these are all fairly straightforward and reasonable.
This would increase the notice period for augmentation in rates for the movement of traffic from 20 to 30 days to ensure that the shippers receive adequate notice of rate increases. Once again, when we are dealing with large bulk transport we need to have some sense of security and some sense of stability in terms of pricing if we are dealing with products.
It would require the railways to publish a list of rail sidings available for the grain producer carloading and to give 60 days' notice before removing such sidings from operation. Once again, if we are going to take out some of that infrastructure that people are dependent on, we have to give the shippers some advance notice so they can begin to make other arrangements.
We also need to ensure that the abandonment and transfer provisions apply to lines that are transferred to provincial short lines and subsequently revert to a federal railway, including the obligation to honour contracts with public passenger service providers.
This is a fairly straightforward and fairly technical bill in which the government is trying to bring in these amendments. As I said, it is to give our shippers some sense of fairness in a market that does not allow very large scale competition. We all know that markets with more competition are generally ones that will favour larger investment and larger use, but certainly with railway, because of the incredible cost of infrastructure and also the history, we have the two big giants. We have always had the two big giants, augmented by many smaller lines and by provincial lines.
In my own region, the Ontario Northland is a provincial line that runs from Hearst. It used to be by rail but now it is by bus. From the Kapuskasing-Cochrane region and actually from Moose Factory the train line runs provincially down south to North Bay, and from North Bay south it becomes one of the CN lines. We are still moving provincial goods along that line. It is still a provincial railway.
It is of paramount importance in our region, because right now if we want to move out any of the goods from the mines, in particular the sulphuric acid cars that are coming out of the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda and the Kidd Creek smelter in Timmins, it is superior by far to move it on the train lines.
These are massive bulk operations, so the shippers need to have some security. As well, we are moving out copper concentrates and zinc concentrates from the Horne smelter in Noranda and also from the Kidd smelter in Timmins. We need some stability in regard to knowing the pricing. As for what is being forwarded in this legislation, even though it is coming in on a provincial line, as I can see from my own region and our dependence on railway traffic, these changes are practical.
Certainly in western Canada the rail lines play an incredible role in the movement of goods and people. As we know, when we are driving across the country and we get to one of those rail sidings when the grain cars are coming along, we can pretty much read from one end of the newspaper to the other before the train has passed.
I am always thrilled to see those train cars come along. I see them coming to the port in Thunder Bay where they end the journey so the freight can then travel by boat. When we see how much can be transferred on those lines, it is truly impressive.
Certainly with the whole move we have seen to the container shipping system, which has actually revolutionized transportation and commercial dealings around the world, we in Canada need to make sure that our railways are in the game and are there with prices that shippers can actually trust so they choose the railway as opposed to simply putting their product onto our overstretched highways.
Whether it is provincial or federal, the investment in highways just has not kept up. In so much of our country, as I have said, we are dealing with two lanes of traffic, except on the busy 401 stretch. Having that massive amount of truck traffic has not been a bonus for our economy. It is costly to the taxpayer because of the impact on roads. We do have a railway system, but we need to ensure that system.
Before I close I will speak a little bit about the whole vision of a national infrastructure plan. As I said, the government is focused on the terminal ports and the gateways for trade, but in order to make trade work in this country we need a vision that says infrastructure and transportation go hand-in-hand. Whether it is the port or whether it is the highway, the two lanes of thin traffic that has to cut through the Canadian Shield carrying the goods, that has to be part of the equation as well.
Infrastructure also goes all the way down to a vision for our municipalities. They are increasingly having to carry the burden of maintaining infrastructure that used to be provincial or federal.
In my little community of Iroquois Falls over 30 kilometres of public highways has just been downloaded and called local roads. There is no base in the taxation to cover off the cost of those roads so they eventually start to deteriorate. It makes it very difficult to attract business to regions when the fundamental infrastructure, whether it is roads, bridges or sewage, begins to deteriorate because the ratepayers, average citizens, are having to pay for it on their water bill or municipal housing bill because there is no provincial or federal commitment to infrastructure.
We have to make infrastructure a priority in the House. The infrastructure deficit being felt across our municipalities right now is affecting regions of the country to maintain a competitive ability to attract business.
I had wanted to speak about infrastructure because railway is part of infrastructure and I will end on that and say that we are very interested in Bill C-8. We think it is a practical bill and the kind of bill that has been brought forward because there have been consultations with many of the shipping and trade associations, including the Canadian Wheat Board. I know that might upset some of my Conservative colleagues but the Canadian Wheat Board certainly felt that there were issues dealing with grain transportation and fairness of price.
We spoke with the Forest Products Association of Canada. We are hauling logs through northern Ontario. I know that in northern Canada rail plays a big part in hauling our wood, our finished products and our logs.
The Canadian Canola Growers Association is in support of this along with the Mining Association of Canada. If are going to do large scale mineral development in this country, at the end of the day we have to ship the products out and rail, by far, is the vehicle of choice to move concentrates or finished products out of mining operations to the ports, particularly the ports on the Pacific right now because the Chinese boom has certainly fuelled a major boom in base metals. We know that is a fact in my region of Sudbury as well as Rouyn-Noranda and Timmins. The railway plays an incredible role in the movement of base metals to serve the expansion in the Far East.
The Western Grain Elevator Association has shown its support for the bill along with Pulse Canada and the Inland Terminal Association of Canada.
At the end of the day, we are talking about some practical amendments to the Transportation Act to ensure fairness of price and that the overall dominance of the market by the two big giants does not come at the expense of the people who need to be able to ship products, who need certainty in price so that they can make long term planning decisions and investments in the economy that will help it continue to grow in the 21st century.
I look forward to seeing the hon. Speaker tonight at the Robbie Burns dinner. I know he apparently has some Scottish background. As one who also has a Scottish background, I wish him all the best, two days after Robbie Burns day.
