GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

61. Surprises in our railway's HQ

CN's CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT had cubicles off diagonal aisles passing through gray space. The indoor/outdoor wall-to-wall carpet was gray, steel desks and overhead shelves and cabinets were gray, large standard typewriters were gray. The acoustic-tiled ceiling was white and the screens of computers whose brand I forget were icey green.

Yet there were sparkling gems among the people. Many of them stopped by to introduce themselves and my boss, Roger, kept taking me to other floors and buildings to meet more. By week's end my brain was blurred. When I finally got some work to do I had to ask the infinitely patient Dorothy, at the window beside mine, to remind me how to get to where I needed to go, and the name of the person there. She had been in the department more than 20 years.

After years of swooping in and out of small private companies in small offices I was in the heart of a huge Crown corporation that functioned around the globe. Both had contented long-time employees, but very different cultures. Its dozen unions weren't interested in the welfare of its employees.

In 1985 it had 65,000 employees and fewer than 50,000 pensioners. The federal government had just appointed J. Maurice LeClair as CEO, with orders to prepare it for privatization. He began down-sizing -- cutting budgets, ordering expense accounts reduced by 10 per cent, and identifying elements a profitable railway could not have: A debt of $3.5 billion, one-sixth of its work force at headquarters, as well as hotels, telecommunications systems, truck and marine transport divisions.

Less than a year after I arrived, a middle-aged artist with about 25 years' service in the Art and Advertising Department was let go. Keith's sparse hair reminded me of my Dad, and other things were similar, too -- average height, weight, always a cheerful look on his face.

I stepped out of my cubicle one day as he walked by with a security guard holding one of his arms. His face ashen, Keith carried a large carton without a lid, a couple of picture frames in it. His entire career had been at CN, supporting a stay-at-home wife and children, as most CN men did then.

Afterwards small groups huddled, whispering anxiously. Like a Pollyanna, I kept saying "there's always another job somewhere" because I'd spent 20 years finding them, but that didn't reassure anyone. They felt real fear. They didn't know how to write a resume, couldn't imagine working anywhere else, didn't have professional networks outside CN.

Worst of all, no one had prepared them for what happened to Keith.

Federal governments had told CN what to do since it was assembled in the 1920s. Its raison d'etre was to salvage about 120 railways that friends of governments had built while huge amounts of money poured into "the colonies" from Europe before World War I.

CN's first president, a brilliant American railroader, Sir Henry Thornton, was a broken man after just four years on the job. Ottawa carried on blithely, using the company to reward relations and friends with jobs, to launch national broadcasting and telecommunications systems, a national airline, then carry troops across the land to sail to Europe from Atlantic ports to World War II. CN was used.

It had layers of workers with no mutual empathy or respect, no pride in "their" corporation. Soon after I was hired a CN train killed someone. My imagination despaired for the man driving the locomotive. He saw what was about to happen, had time to think, to feel that he could not stop....

I asked someone what the company did for engineers after an incident. The question surprised him. Why would the railway do anything? What could it do? The engineer was doing his job. None of the dozen unions was really interested in the well-being of its employees, only in their earning enough to pay union dues.