§ Sir K. VAUGHAN-MORGANasked the Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, whether he is aware that the British Treasury in 1862 enabled the Grand Trunk Railway Company of Canada to issue imperial postal and military bonds so as to link up Toronto with Halifax and to facilitate the transport of wheat from Canada to England; and, seeing that the holders of Grand Trunk preferential bonds yielded priority to these imperial bonds 1142W on the express condition that all the earnings of the company, after deduction of agreed working expenses, should be appropriated and applied in payment of 5 per cent. on these preferential bonds; that these bondholders subsequently accepted perpetual preference stocks in lieu of their bonds, thereby enabling the company to finance railway connections with the United States of America; that the Crown granted the company a Crown lease of land in Cockspur Street, Westminster, the rents whereof are still subject to the 1862 agreement regarding the appropriation and application of earnings, and that the Parliament of Canada now claims, by means of extra-territorial legislation, to expropriate this land and other property rights lying outside the Dominion and to transfer to the Canadian Minister of Finance the earnings thereon without compensating the perpetual stockholders; and will he propose to the Canadian Government that the subject matter of the stockholders' claim for compensation should be referred to arbitration?
§ Mr. LUNNI would refer the hon. and gallant Member to the reply given by my predecessor to his question of 6th November last, which stated that the matter was not one in which His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom could intervene. This view was arrived at by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom after fully taking into account all the facts of the case.