My father and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau at Union Station in Ottawa, 1968

                                                                                                                           

The Canadian National Railway was a Federal Crown Corporation, owned by the people of Canada.
 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. 
"The People's Railway" is now "North America's Railroad".
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.
  We allow the privatization of Olympic venues, Expo pavilions, Dominion Buildings, federal prisons,  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.
A statue commissioned by the Trudeau government called "The Universal Man" was removed from the base of the CN Tower and lay face down in a field for several years. The Universal Man, created by Gerald Gladstone, now stands in the parking lot of the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto, Ontario

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.

 The Department of Public Works at one time was "The country's largest realtor". The Hon. Erik Nielsen was a Minister of Public Works: