OTTAWA (Staff) – If Quebecers vote Oct. 30 to leave Canada, they also should expect to lose the headquarters of CN Rail and the hundreds of jobs that go with it, a Manitoba MP warned last week.
Bill Blaikie (NDP-Winnipeg Transcona) told the Commons that people in his city never understood why CN head offices should stay in Montreal.
When the government pushed through legislation earlier this year to allow the sale of CN, it stipulated the head offices for the newly privatized company must remain where they are, in Montreal.
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Provision void
“I think I can say with some certainty that if there is a yes vote in Quebec, the provision (in the bill) guaranteeing that the headquarters of this new privatized CN will be in Montreal will not continue very long,” said Blaikie. “At least if I have anything to do with it, it will not.”
He said people in the West “from the very beginning felt that if CN was to be restructured … the headquarters of CN should be in Western Canada, in particular in Winnipeg, because most of the traffic this new privatized CN will be directing will be in Western Canada.”
