The federal Prime Minister could not miss an opportunity to interfere in provincial jurisdictions. During a speech given on July 5 at the congress of the International Council of Nurses, he did not hesitate to interfere in the working conditions of nurses. He launched in quick succession that “beautiful compliments do not pay the rent”, that it takes “a great deal of dedication to string together shifts often lasting more than 12 hours” and other evidence, all sprinkled with his usual smiles. However, not a word about his repeated refusal to reduce federal health transfers to a viable threshold for the provinces.
We would receive the Prime Minister’s remarks with consideration if his management were exemplary within federal jurisdictions. Alas, the facts point in the opposite direction. Inability to solve the problems of the Phoenix pay system, incredible delays in the shipbuilding program, shameful waiting times for immigration, gross negligence in protecting the banks of the St. Lawrence against erosion, among others. Some will say, to mitigate his fault, that these are complex problems.
So let’s take a low complexity problem. Amtrak, the American Via Rail, suspended its passenger train service between Montreal and New York on June 23. According to the American television network NBC, Canadian National has restricted the speed of trains to 16 km/h between Saint-Lambert, near Montreal, and the Rouses Point border crossing. Since then, it takes 4 hours 30 minutes to cross the 73 kilometers which separate the two points. And the restriction is based on heat. You read that right, heat! The tracks are in such poor condition that the heat could cause them to break under the weight of a train traveling at normal speed. Our American friends are confused and point out that the problem is north of the border.
Guess who has jurisdiction over this railroad! We should invite our dear Prime Minister to a convention on transportation to explain how his government manages to neglect to such an extent the simple monitoring of the condition of a cross-border railway. Ten years after the Lac-Mégantic tragedy, Quebec is once again brought back to the third world in rail matters, with, of course, the compliments of Transport Canada and Justin Trudeau. If nice compliments don’t pay the rent, nice smiles don’t keep trains rolling.
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