With all due respect, Mr. Speaker, I do have to suggest that the hon. gentleman's recollection of history is just a little faulty. Alexander Mackenzie was not the prime minister in 1783. It was 1873 that he was the prime minister and he discovered on his desk the first day he walked into the office the Pacific scandal about the railway that was handed to him by Sir John A. Macdonald.
It is a bit of a waste of time to debate those ancient Conservative scandals. It was about the time that Louis Riel was becoming the member of Parliament for my district of the country. In any event, those historical references are fascinating, but it is more important for us to get on with the task of actually dealing with the circumstance today.
The major debate, as the hon. gentleman will recall, before 2006, was not about level of service agreements; it was about a costing review and whether railways were overcharging. There were in fact legal actions going on during the 1990s and the early part of the last decade that resulted in some major refunds to farmers because the railways had been caught overcharging for the freight rates they imposed for the services they were delivering, as substandard as those services were.
Until the middle part of this last decade, the issue was a costing review. In the latter part of the last decade, the issue shifted to this whole discussion about level of service, which brought about the seven year process that I talked about.
The hon. gentleman can be assured that we have no intention of delaying the legislation, either in the House or in committee, with this one caveat. We want to hear what the shippers say. If the shippers' expectations are properly and adequately addressed when we hear the testimony going through the committee, then we will be most anxious to see the legislation passed with whatever subsequent modifications the shippers might recommend.