• Eiri@lemmy.ca
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    5 hours ago

    Wasn’t it originally a huge public undertaking? It was my understanding that the rails and CN began their lives in public ownership before being privatized.

    Did I misunderstand things?

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      The railways were built privately for the most part, and eventually most of them defaulted on loans and became CN. Which I guess was public for a long time, but competed with a number of private operators still like CP. Via was a heavily subsidized passenger crown corp because nobody could make passenger service profitable.