Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan educating me on her riding. I am from northern Alberta. I have a lot of farmers, ranchers, cow-calf producers, a lot of agriculture in my riding. I was quite surprised to hear her get up today and speak on agriculture because in just about every rural area of Canada where farmers are found, Conservatives represent them and represent them well.
We recognize there is a balance between farmers and railways in order for farmers to be successful and for railways to have some ability to continue to operate successfully in a business environment or quite frankly they will not be there.
Railways, just like farmers, play a key role in Canada's economic prosperity. This Conservative government will help ensure the railways and the customers who depend on them are well positioned to meet the challenges of the global marketplace in the future. Their competition is in different places around the world. One part of Canada is not competing against another. We are competing as a global power against other agricultural powers.
Over the past 27 years we have seen real changes in Canada, positive changes. Western grain transport, for instance, has shifted from a regime of rate controls and heavy government subsidies toward a progressively more commercial framework.
I appreciate the fact that the member is a hard worker and is very intelligent. The difficulty I have is that NDP members talk the talk but when it comes to voting, they vote against our initiatives for farmers. That is what disturbs me constantly. The NDP members get up on these late show questions and talk about how they want to help farmers and how they want to balance what they need to do, but I wish they would do exactly the same thing when it came to voting.
The revenue cap regime was introduced in 2000 based on over a century of evidence of the shortcomings of cost-based regulations, including massive government subsidies and lack of incentives for railways to invest in infrastructure. As a result, our railways were in very poor condition.
Under previous approaches that kept rates artificially low for farmers, the railways incurred significant losses and were unable to invest in grain cars or rail lines. As a result of those heavy losses, how could they invest in those rail lines? How could farmers rely on them to be able to ship their products by this transportation method?
Substantial government subsidies were required to keep western grain transport viable, including almost $540 million for the purchase of hopper cars, $4.8 billion from 1967 to 1983 to subsidize railway losses on grain, another $1.3 billion from 1986 to 1990 to rehabilitate branch lines, and $7.9 billion to subsidize freight rates between 1982 and 1996. Who paid for this? The Canadian people paid for it.
That is why this new method is working so much better. The current revenue cap regime creates incentives for the railways to operate efficiently and to invest in their infrastructure. Rail efficiencies in recent years have actually allowed grain to be moved more quickly and smoothly than during periods of previous governments, and that includes government regulation of course.
Railways have also used efficiency gains to modernize their fleets with larger capacity grain cars, which gives a competitive advantage, and to invest in their own infrastructure and railway cars.
This Conservative government stands up for farmers. We are not going to take any lessons from the NDP.