🚀 go-pugleaf

The Canadian National Railways of Canada are up for sale.

"CN is no longer a part of our heritage", said the transport minister of
Canada. So Mr. Thornton's road is being offered for sale. 

There will be no restriction regarding buyers, wherever they come from,
except that no one will be able to own more than half of the offered
stock.

However, CN is still grasping with it's enormous debt, inherited from
it's component railroads (most notably the Grand Trunk Railway, which
was absorbed into the Canadian Government Railways so it would not go
bankrupt and a divident could still be paid - hence the huge debt; let's
not forget that Canada is a british colony so it exists solely for the
benefit of Britain), so there is some "restructuring" work to be done so
the CN pill appears palatable to potential investors... 

While CNR was assembled from a patchwork of unprofitable/ inefficient/
bankrupt lines, the enormously profitable Canadian Pacific Railway was
not nationalized, thus seriously lopsiding the Canadian railroad picture
for the years to come with two behemoths, one public, and one private.

Regarding the upcoming stock sale, some rules regarding line closing
and/or sellout will have to change, and by reading between the lines,
one can feel that labour laws and collective agreements with railroaders
will also need restructuring.

Currently, canadian railroaders are under an emergency law that
prohibits them from striking (although they are otherwise legally able
to do so), while negociations still go on between railroads and unions.
The main litigious point is job safety (older railroaders are guaranteed
their full salary until their pension if there is no work for them, even
if they refuse a transfer to another part of the country - but this is
not so much an unrealistic thing when one considers that for most of the
french people working in Qu�bec, being transferred to the english part
of Canada is virtually equivalent to forced exile).


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    Marc Dufour, alias mdufour@cam.org depuis 1994
    [\] ACUC 6 31874             http://WWW.CAM.ORG/~mdufour