Western Producer staff
It has become a familiar Parliament Hill sight in the past decade: A bureaucrat or politician stands nodding and listening as a tall, bulky, bearded man with a steady stare button-holes him with more facts and figures about the plight and potential of his railroad.
Soon, with promises to follow it up, the Ottawa Man begins to cast about for a way to disengage himself from this persistent lobbyist.
As he strides away, Tom Payne casts looks around for another listening post, another power broker who needs to be tuned in about Alberta’s Central Western Railway (CWR).
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It is all part of being enough of a Payne in the neck around Ottawa to win your point.
“It’s part of what you have to run a railway,” says Payne.
“You have to keep your eye on what’s going on. It’s a lot of detail stuff.”
Since he helped launch the central Alberta short-line railway in 1986, Payne has become good at the “detail stuff.”
His victory this month in convincing the federal Liberal government to change its budget to give the CWR needed revenue is just the latest successful tangle with Ottawa’s powers-that-be.
He has lobbied for, and won, passage of legislation to incorporate the railway, to change the Railway Act and to fix up other parts of the legal framework.
“I’ve been to Ottawa I don’t know how many times on this stuff and I have files here three inches thick,” he says from his Edmonton office.
“It’s amazing.”
Payne says his pitch has been “the need for equity in public policy.”
It has been helped by his dogged pursuit of his issues, bending the ears of ministers, deputy ministers, reporters, MPs or anyone else he thinks might be able to influence policy or help advance his cause.
It seems like an odd career twist for the 45-year-old who a decade ago was a locomotive engineer for the CPR.
Then, railroading was about freight and schedules, weather and work shifts.
Since he decided to run a railway, Payne has learned that the decisions, whims and miscues of the bureaucrats and politicians in Ottawa can have as much effect on his bottom line as does the grain crop or the weather.
“It’s complicated down there,” he reflects.
“And once decisions are made, it is hard to change them. You have to be vigilant to try to prevent them.”
And sometimes, it seems the work of government watching never ends.
With funding now secure in the budget bill, will Payne be able to turn his full attention back to what he really wants to do – run a railway?
“Damned if I know,” he says with a laugh.
“You tell me what Ottawa is going to throw at us in the next few years and I’ll tell you if I have to be worried or not. I’ll be there if I have to be.”
