NINE years and counting. What to do about the government’s aging fleet of grain hopper cars has been one of the longest railway sagas in Canadian history, though not the sort of drama that Pierre Berton chronicled in The National Dream or Gordon Lightfoot immortalized in his centennial classic Canadian Railroad Trilogy.
Rather than the stuff of legend, this is the stuff of ridicule about government’s ability to turn a simple decision about disposing an asset into a career for some bureaucrats. If comedians heard about this, it could become fodder for late night TV jokes.
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How long does it take to dispose of unwanted government property?
As long as possible.
For the record, federal cabinet decided and announced in February 1996 that it would sell the 12,500 government grain hopper cars because they were no longer needed as a tool of public policy and because the $200 million or so they were worth could help fight the deficit.
An industry was formed. The Farmer Rail Car Coalition has spent countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to bid for farmer control of the cars. Bureaucrats, railways and others have burned up person years piled upon person years to analyze the values, the costs, the potentials, the risks, the alternatives.
Last week, after years of to-ing and fro-ing, senior Transport Canada official Kristine Burr told MPs the government is more or less where it was in the winter of 1995-96 when the original decision was being made.
It is back to square one.
“The decision was taken in 1996 and it didn’t quite happen…. At this point in time, with new ministers and a new government, the question is again on the table whether to dispose or the hopper car fleet or not,” she said.
Lord love a duck. Back where we started and there is little reason to expect the department will be ready to advise the transport minister on a proper decision anytime soon.
It has conflicting offers and claims about the best option, and a number of players now say continued government ownership is best. It faces an improved fiscal situation in which the $200 million it could receive for the cars is less important than it was in deficit-obsessed 1996.
And the department still lacks definitive analysis about such basic issues as maintenance costs each year, what repairs a new owner would have to do on the cars and what the impact would be on the efficiency of the prairie grain handling system.
Did I mention it has been nine years since the original cabinet decision was made to sell the cars?
Just for perspective, the first prairie spike was driven for the first transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway, in early 1877. The track reached Winnipeg in October 1877. The last spike was driven in British Columbia by former Selkirk, Man. MP Donald Smith, aka Lord Strathcona, on Nov. 6, 1885.
In other words, it took less than nine years to build the railroad from the Manitoba-Ontario border to the Pacific Coast 120 years ago.
Last week, Commons agriculture committee chair Paul Steckle called for a decision. “This has gone on far too long. I think we have to bring some clarity, some certainty, some finality to this issue.”
Amen. Does Gladys Knight have Pips?
