CANADIAN RAILWAYS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21295, 23 September 1932, Page 8

CANADIAN RAILWAYS

The Canadian Government has derided to give legislative effect to the recommendations of the Commission on Railways and Transportation. What Mr. R. B. Bennett describes as "financial irresponsibility" in the management of the National Railways is to be removed by the appointment of trustees charged with Ihe task of eliminating waste through unprofitable competition and the Canadian Pacific Company is to be under a statutory obligation to co-operate in the general purpose. The reference to freeing the National Railways from political interference and community pressure indicates an aspect of the Canadian problem that was shared by New Zealand until control of the system was placed in the hands of a board armed with wide powers. It has been said that the Canadian system of railways presupposes a large machine for a small population—42,ooo miles for approximately ten million people. If the war had not checked the rapid increase in population by immigration, and if the had not reduced the freight and passenger traffic of the lines, it would have been asserted confidently that the development of half a continent de manded capital expenditure on railways to this extent. The unforeseen having happened, the financial position is a grave one. Present difficulties, however, are only an aggravation of a basic weakness. In the flush of the success Avhich was achieved by the opening of the Canadian Pacific line in 1886, other railway projects on a grand scale were soon advanced, and the first

fifteen years of the century saw the j planning and completion of two additional transcontinental lines—the Grand Trunk from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert linking with the National Transcontinental, a State enterprise from Winnipeg to Moncton, New Brunswick, and the Canadian Northern from Vancouver to Montreal. These were all merged into the Canadian National Railways by 1923, competition and overcapitalisation having created difficulties more or less insuperable individually. A much more fateful day of reckoning has now arrived. Earnings have dropped not only through the influence of the depression but also on account of growing motor competition. What now is proposed is really a national plan of co-opera-tion unhampered by political influence. But in Canada, as in New Zealand, the worst burden is that which was politically-created in the spendthrift past, for few of the private lines would have been attempted without State aid and inducements.