Taylor Bachrach will be home for Christmas — he hopes.
On Sunday, the NDP transportation critic and MP for the riding of Skeena-Bulkley Valley, plans to leave the House of Commons and start a series of train rides that will begin in Toronto and end more than 4,500 kilometres west in his hometown of Smithers, B.C. — about 200 kilometres inland from B.C.'s north coast.
That journey could be complicated by the fact that passenger trains in Canada are often delayed when they have to give right of way to cargo traffic travelling on the same tracks.
And that's exactly the point: Bachrach's journey is part of a quest to build support for a bill he introduced in Parliament this week.
The Rail Passenger Priority Act calls for the Canada Transportation Act to be amended so that any time a passenger and cargo train want to use the same rail line, the passenger train gets priority.
Tagging @politicsofcanada
In gradeschool we did the requisite Trip to Ottawa by train from Winnipeg. We arrived 18 hours late, not even the same day we'd been scheduled to arrive. This was during the last Pearson days, and very little has improved since then.
As they say, in Canadian English we have no word for 'train'.
when I was a kid I took a trip from my home town to my grand parent's place with my mum and two siblings.
Its a 2 hour car trip.
It took us SEVENTEEN HOURS on the Via trains in southern Ontario.
Since then, the trains stopped running to my grand parent's home despite it being Kitchener - a fair sized city.
Getting Passenger Priority is a basic thing that is needed to make Via Rail the function rail service that Canadians deserve