Then the railway was privatized, to the detriment of our economy, history and sovereignty.
The Canadian National Railway's real estate portfolio was comprised of the CN Tower in Toronto, office towers, land, bridges, train stations, hotels...the list goes on.At one time a tunnel connected Union Station in Ottawa to the Chateau Laurier Hotel, located directly across the street.
Tunnels also connected:
Union Station in Toronto to the Royal York Hotel
Union Station in Winnipeg to the Fort Garry Hotel.
Union Station in Saskatoon to the Bessborough Hotel
Union Station in Edmonton to the Hotel Macdonald.
Union Station in Calgary to the Palliser Hotel
The railway hotels and train stations were Canada's Eiffel Towers, Taj Mahals and Parthenon Temples. However, the CNR and CPR hotels were nothing more than an investment to Carl (Gordon Gekko) Icahn.
"The People's Railway" is now "North America's Railroad".
Carl Icahn, Prince al Waleed and Bill Gates profited from the denationalization of an irreplaceable Crown Jewel, that was created to benefit the inhabitants of this land; not to line the pockets of Wall Street investors.
The Crown corporation Via Rail has to pay CN to use tracks that were built physically and through their tax dollars by our ancestors. And CN, a multinational corporation, has priority over use of the tracks, they can tell Via Rail to stop their trains and wait if CN wants to use the railway tracks.
The owners of CN Rail couldn't care less about my country's built heritage; railway stations were either sold off, demolished or abandoned (for example, the Kingston, Ontario CNR train station was abandoned and had blue tarp covering it.)
We as a nation are so apathetic that we allow the privatization of Olympic venues, Expo pavilions, Dominion Buildings, federal penitentiaries, lighthouses...
Many train stations in Canada were threatened with demolition---Windsor Station in Montreal, Union Station in Ottawa, Union Station in Toronto and Summerhill Station in Toronto, to name a few.
investment in the former Crown corporation.
We, the citizens of Canada, owned the CNR's 100,000 acres of land; thousands of train stations; a vast network of railroad tracks; CN towers in Toronto, Edmonton, Saskatoon and London, Ontario; and roundhouses. The Spadina roundhouse in Toronto was flattened to make way for the Skydome, now known as the Rogers Centre.
A statue commissioned by the Trudeau government called "The Universal Man" was wrenched from the base of the CN Tower and lay face down in a field for several years. The Universal Man, created by Gerald Gladstone, was eventually rescued and now stands in the parking lot of the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto, Ontario.
The Trump Tower was built on CNR land at Bay and Adelaide streets in Toronto.
I wrote a few articles about Canada's train industry on my blog savecfbrockcliffe:
1.) Prime Minister Trudeau tried to return Canadian Pacific Railway land to the people of Canada
2.) Railway properties
3.) Former railway properties
4.) The train doesn't stop here anymore
5.) Facts about Marathon Realty, the real estate arm of the Canadian Pacific Railway
Regarding the first document below: Canadian National Railway staff refused to give Federal Minister of Public Works Erik Nielsen any information about CNR real estate holdings, in 1985. The Department of Public Works at one time was "The country's largest realtor". Erik Nielsen was interviewed by author Stevie Cameron for her book "On the Take" and Mr. Nielsen said "The crooks come out of the woodwork" whenever large sums of money are involved; and the largest chunk of money found in the Canadian government was in its real estate holdings. Billions of dollars worth of federal Crown property has been sold in the last 33 years.
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