In the early 1930s, a young graduate of McGill University sat down for an interview with Sir Edward Beatty, then the president of Canadian Pacific railways, as part of his application for a scholarship at Oxford. Beatty, as the story goes, asked the young applicant: “What would be your first step if you were elected Prime Minister?” to which he replied “I’d nationalize the Canadian Pacific.”

The applicant in question was the young socialist organizer David Lewis who, perhaps on the strength of his chutzpah alone, was duly awarded his scholarship and soon after began his studies at Oxford. As leader of the NDP some forty years later, Lewis would campaign to turn his retort into national policy during the 1972 federal election — the privatization mania that would sweep much of the world in the following decades having not yet arrived to stigmatize the concept of public ownership and render it the anachronism it’s often assumed to be today.

The intervening years have, to say the least, offered a mountain of evidence to strengthen the classical socialist case for nationalization of sectors like transit — the market failing, again and again, to provide decent service or meet basic standards of efficiency. The privatization of British Rail, to take an obvious and famous example, has been an unmitigated disaster: the business of getting around the United Kingdom by train today being both complicated and expensive (the cost of a single ticket from London to Manchester more than tripled between 1995 and 2013).