Mr. Speaker, it is with some pleasure that I rise today to address Bill C-52, which is perhaps not the best named act I have ever seen.
The naming suggests that the problems shippers face across this country will now be solved. For those of us who come from the resource regions of this country, for years we have sat with shippers in forestry, farming, chemical and manufacturing industries as they have petitioned us, as members of Parliament, to do something about the situation. Recently the Coalition of Rail Shippers was asked and polled as to what its satisfaction was with the service they were receiving from the competitive duopoly, as described by the minister. Eighty per cent of those polled described serious and significant problems with their access to rail. That is not great.
While Bill C-52 is an improvement over the status quo, it has been five to six years promised and in the waiting. We see today what I can at best describe as a half measure. As the minister pointed out, as critical as rail service is to the Canadian economy, I think we could emphasize it even more. Seventy per cent of all the goods Canadians manufacture and sell in this country go by rail. An efficient economy, which we see with some of our European partners, would have an even higher percentage. It is the most efficient way to move things across borders and large tracts of land, which are two things we contend with here in Canada.
The minister described the near monopoly as a duopoly. I will take a moment on this, because I think it is important for Canadians to realize that if, for the Conservative government, the definition of a competitive marketplace is what we have in the rail shipping industry, we have a problem. Not only are there only two significant shippers available to those who are looking to move their product, but in many regions of the country there is only one. The line going to their freight yard, farm or lumber yard is controlled and wholly owned by one shipper. If one has a problem with that company, the status quo is terrible.
Members have seen it time and again. I can think of one particular mill in my riding in northwestern B.C., in Fort St. James, that has crawled through perhaps one of the toughest times the lumber market has ever seen since B.C. started shipping wood. It has managed to have a partnership with the union, get concessions on wages and have a great partnership with the community. It finally got to a viable place after years of struggle and against all odds. This is one of those communities for which it would be an understatement to say it relies on this industry.
At the end of the day it cannot get cars to move its products to market. It has product. It has someone willing to purchase that product. In between stands a rail company that does not seem to care that it made a contractual promise to deliver so many cars on such and such a date. The mill is waiting days and weeks for the cars to show up. The wood is stacked up in the yard and they cannot sell it.
The mill has turned to me as the member of Parliament. We approached the government with appeals and have said we need two things. One, we need both the carrot and the stick. We need a way for companies to deal with the shippers in a timely and cost-effective manner so that the conflict resolution model is not onerous and expensive. Again, smaller companies get penalized under this system.
CN and CP have had many years now of extraordinary profit. Since it was privatized under the Liberal government in the late 1990s, CN has gone on to see record profits and is now run primarily out of Texas. Most Canadians do not realize that, just because the cars have a Canadian flag on the side, where the cars actually go and to whom and when is not necessarily decided under Canadian interest.
This legislation would allow the government to look to a company and say that even though it received $2.5 billion profit last year, we are going to really hit it hard by charging a $100,000 fine only if we find a serious and significant problem, only if the company looking to move its product is willing to pursue this all the way through the quasi-judicial process. At the end of the day maybe it will get fined.
To CN and CP, these very large companies, it may be an easy equation to let them go through that dispute resolution, pursue it all the way through. It is more efficient and cost-saving for CN and CP to just ignore it. At the end of the day the worst case scenario is they would get a $100,000 fine.
That might just be the cost of doing business, because these companies could turn more profit in sending those cars somewhere else even though they have a signed contract.
What is frustrating for a lot of these farmers is that they have contracts and they assume that those contracts mean something and then at the end of the day they do not, because they are beholden. The power imbalance is too great.
The Minister of State for Transport is attempting to readjust the power equation a bit. He mentioned as much in his answer to one of the questions. It has to be recognized that, in that key and critical relationship between those who make the goods and those who ship the goods, there is a disparity of power. We need to rebalance the tables a bit.
Often New Democrats talk about the underdogs, or people who have lost their jobs, or people who have fallen through the social safety net that the government continues to tear up. The underdogs we are talking about here are often major manufacturing outfits in Canada, very significant large farming interests. One would think they would have a lot of sway and power with the government, but for some reason the major rail companies that exist in this country, the duopoly, seem to be able to pull the string on the government and essentially get what they want.
We waited six years. I know the minister said it was a nanosecond in Ottawa time or in geological time. I am not sure which, but five or six years is not a priority for a government. There have probably been 90 or 100 bills on crime and punishment from the current government. This is the first one on rail, and yet rail moves 70% of the product that we sell around the world. For the government to call it a priority, I would hate to see what the government thinks is not a priority because this legislation has been a while in the waiting.
Some people listening might think this is one of those rural-urban issues that only really affects those living in the resource sections of our country, those places that grow the trees and mine the rock and produce the energy and whatnot. Nothing could be more further from the fact. This is one of those issues that crosses over the interests of all Canadians, because if we are unable to move our products in a reasonable time to market either within a province, between provinces, across borders, to those international ports in Prince Rupert, Montreal, Halifax and beyond, it hurts everybody. When things are not reasonable and we cannot find a way to solve the problems of this power imbalance between these two companies centrally and all of the shippers involved, it hurts everybody. It hurts people right across the board.
The government is seeking to get a balance. While this legislation is worthy of consideration at committee, we hope and pray that the government is open and interested in amendments to achieve the balance that the minister talked about in his comments. I come from communities that rely on that line. It is our connection to the world. It is our connection to a viable and secure economic future. When that line is disrupted for whatever reason—either through contracts that are not fulfilled by the rail companies or some geological disruption, to take some of the minister's line—it is absolutely critical to us because in today's economy, as competitive as it is, getting products to market in a timely and efficient manner is absolutely essential. We are competing with the world, and we can, but we need a good infrastructure system.
We used to have governments in Canada, of either more progressive or more conservative persuasions, that believed in the necessity to have that strong infrastructure. That was a role of government to pursue and enable the growth of the country. It was a Conservative government at the beginning that initiated the dream of a rail line across this country and drove that last spike. However since those times the present version of the Conservatives believes that the role of government is slightly different.
Here obviously what government must do is play referee on what we would argue is an unbalanced playing field. To this point, looking at a $100,000 fine for companies that are turning billions in profit perhaps suggests to the companies that the incentive is not there. When cars do not show up, when cars show up damaged and not useful and late and unable to ship the product that they are contracted for, most reasonable Canadians would say there is a dispute that would have to be filed through court. If it is the only company they can ship with, then how often are these companies going to go hard at it? Therefore they come through us. They come through MPs who represent these various constituencies and implore us to do something about it.
This legislation is the government's attempt to do something about it. It has taken us a few steps. We insist that the government be open to taking us the rest of the way, so that at the end of the day we get it right this time, because we do not take on this issue very often in Parliament. Even though it may be a nanosecond for the government, this is years of frustration for industry; this is millions if not billions of dollars lost to the Canadian economy.