Agriculture Committee on May 5th, 2014

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Mr. Hoback spoke most eloquently, but when we look at the package of Bill C-30, it exists to address an urgent situation in western Canada regarding the movement of grain. That's right now and for the foreseeable future. It's not meant to be a change. These changes are not meant to be in effect for eternity, for any long period of time. They're meant to be in effect to address the problem that exists today until it is properly rectified.

That's the whole package of changes. That's why I was asking Madame Brosseau some questions about this particular amendment, because this is a package of changes, not just a single change. It all works together in the same piece of legislation to address the problem that exists today and for the foreseeable future.

As Mr. Hoback said, “I think it's appropriate that it has a sunset clause”. As I mentioned in my first remarks, that sunset clause can be delayed. The clauses that would repeal all of what we're doing in Bill C-30 can be delayed if the situation has not been rectified by the time we get to August 2016.

There is already a mechanism that allows for the extension of all of these provisions built into the legislation if the problem has not been rectified in a suitable way by August 2016. I believe we've addressed this in a very comprehensive manner. It has a start; it has a finish. The finish can be extended if the problem of moving grain in western Canada has not been rectified in a meaningful way.

As Mr. Hoback mentioned, there's going to be a full review of the Canada Transportation Act earlier than previously thought. That will start, as you said, this summer, Mr. Hoback. That might be where discussion would take place about long-term changes to the Canada Transportation Act as opposed to what's seen here as a short-term implementation of initiatives to address a specific problem, and then routing one of them out and saying, “Well, that one we want to go on and on and on”.

In fact, as Mr. Hoback said, that would or could restrict or have an impact on the more fulsome review of the Canada Transportation Act when it starts this summer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Mr. Eyking.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Mr. Hoback, Mr. Lemieux, I hope it is true that that will happen. We have our experts here. Through you, Mr. Chair, is that their understanding that this is going to be reviewed and that this could continue on without any major return to the House of Commons and having to go through the whole thing again? Is there a mechanism in place for this to happen, or does it have to go through this whole process again?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

I would ask Madam Duff from Transport if she maybe wanted to make a comment, or I'll leave it open.

First of all I want to say thank you to Mr. Meredith for coming. He is the assistant deputy minister at Agriculture Canada.

From the Department of Transport, we have Lenore Duff, director general for surface transportation policy. From the Department of Justice, Demeena Kaur Seyan, counsel for agriculture and food inspection legal services; Alain Langlois, senior legal counsel for transport; and Sara Guild, counsel with the Department of Justice.

Ms. Duff, did you want to comment on that please?

[Lenore Duff, Director General, Surface Transportation Policy, Department of Transport]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll comment on the Canada Transportation Act review. Our minister has indicated that this review will be advanced and be commencing this summer. I'll let Alain Langlois answer the question with respect to the expiry of this legislation and the provisions around that.

[Alain Langlois, Senior Legal Counsel, Transport, Legal Services, Department of Justice]

The comment was a fair comment. The way the current legislation is drafted calls for the legislation to sunset on August 1, 2016, unless both Houses of Parliament pass a resolution to extend its life.

So if your question is, do we have to go through this entire process again, to me the answer is no. You need a resolution from both Houses to extend for a period that the resolution will—

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

It has to go through the Senate and the House of Commons again?

[Alain Langlois]

By resolution.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

I guess that's yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Chair. My apologies for being late. It happens with airplanes.

Mr. Langlois, we saw what happened to the last amendment. Are we confident that I'm not going to have to go through the House of Commons, and I say “me” because we approved this together, and have this turned back by the House, which would be an embarrassment, to be perfectly blunt?

So does this pass muster in your view? Quite frankly, if it's not going to, then we need to make sure that it does, otherwise we are simply wasting more time.

I have another comment-question to ask, but I'll wait for the response on that one first.

[Alain Langlois]

This is not the typical way you draft a coming-into-effect provision, but this is not novel. This has been done in the past. The language of clause 15 of the bill is found in other legislation, and that's where we inspired ourselves in drafting this. It's not something that we invented out of thin air. It was passed by Parliament before.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Mr. Lemieux wouldn't mind having a comment on it also.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Malcolm, the difference between before and now is that Parliament itself has authorized the committee to include this amendment in Bill C-30 if it so chooses. That's the difference.

The process that we saw in the House cannot repeat itself, because the House has stated clearly that the committee should have another look at this amendment and if it chooses to incorporate it, it may be incorporated.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Have you got a supplementary question, Mr. Allen?

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

On the issue of sunsetting, and not to belabour the point, I understand why one doesn't, based on Mr. Hoback's position and the government's position that this will hopefully enable the players to come to the table and actually get a review.

In my viewpoint, it depends on what stick you want them to come with. Let me be blunt. It was a public meeting when the railroaders came before us a few weeks ago. I don't have a lot of confidence.... It's not to point at my friends down at the end. It was not you. But they were sitting basically at the end of the table like our friends are this morning and they didn't give me the warm and fuzzies that they intended to actually get a deal done. In fact, they were extremely angry, and if I can paraphrase Mr. Mongeau, he basically told us that we should not regulate him, which doesn't lead me to believe that one should put the stick away. In fact, one should get the big stick out, not the little stick.

When someone comes to me and tells me as a parliamentarian that “You don't have the right, sir, to regulate us,” they are in the wrong game, and if you want to check Hansard, that's exactly what I told him. I would tell him that again. I've dealt with players like that across the bargaining table before. You bring the big stick because if you park the big stick, they'll bring theirs, and then you are at a disadvantage. They do not like this, and the reason they don't is that it's the big stick, and they hate it, if I can use that term. That is a harsh term, Mr. Chair, I appreciate that, but they do.

I would suggest that you may want to think about the sunset clause for a few more minutes before you decide to leave it in, because they didn't come to the table with any indication that they intended to sit down and really, truly do a full review that we all think should happen—all of us, quite frankly, literally all of us in this Parliament believe. Consequently, we've all been supportive of this and trying to make it happen as expeditiously as we possibly and humanly can.

I'm afraid if we park the stick in the sense of “let's work together on this”, you may find yourselves looking for one when you're dealing with them. I certainly won't be at the table. The government is going to be doing the review, and the folks in the department are going to be doing a review from transport. Somebody may want to be looking for that stick, and if you've parked it, you're going to have to look for another one. You may want to just keep it in your hip pocket. You don't have to use it, but you always have to have one.

The old adage in Welland is, don't come to a gun fight with a knife. So I would suggest you think about it, just for a second or two, before you say, we'd be happy to entertain a friendly amendment that simply gives you, the government, the option not to sunset this, and just take it away. It's not a big deal. The intent is this shouldn't be there forever. It should be the rail review. That should solve the issue, and then the process should look after itself and we should never have to do this again. I think that's everyone's hope and intent. But I say again, if you go with a little popsicle stick, you might get whacked on the side of the head by somebody with the big stick, and you won't have one to hit them back with.

I simply say that based on the performance of both gentlemen who came from both railroads, so you're going to have to deal with them. They didn't come to us in a conciliatory way. I would suggest you go back and look at Hansard and see exactly what they said. Because they didn't.

That's my only concern. I've heard the response from Pierre, I appreciate that, and from Mr. Langlois, I appreciate that as well, and I feel comfortable. I'm not stuck on the rail review. Let me make that abundantly clear. I'm not going to hang my hat on that. It's not a hill to die on for me. I just suggest it as a cautionary tale, and perhaps you might need the big stick. You just might. If you believe that the railroaders come with honesty and good intentions and intend to fix it this time.... You had one experience last year. I would suggest some of you should think about how you felt that experience was for you, and ask the shippers and the farmers what the experience was for them, and whether they thought it was a good one.

Do you think you're actually going to get a change next time? If you believe it to be true, I guess you park the big stick. If you have doubts, keep the big stick in your holster because you're going to need it come the time when they come to the table, because they are going to come guns ablazing.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you, Mr. Allen.

We'll go now to Mr. Hoback, please.

[Randy Hoback, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Allen. You put a lot of thought into what you were saying.

You're absolutely right about the way these guys have treated our farmers, the way they've treated our sector, the way they've treated not just grain producers but basically anybody who ships anything on rail, and the way they've taken them for granted. They've abused their relationship in such a way that they have no concept or no respect for timeliness of service, quality of service, or anything to do with service. In fact I don't think either one of those CEOs understands service at all.

If they think they can go through the review coming up this summer and get the same results as they had before, and I have to come back here next winter because my farmers are screaming because they're sitting there with not only last year's crop but now this year's crop sitting in their bins, and the two CEOs are sitting there saying they still don't have a problem, you know what? I'm going to be very, very, very, very upset, and my stick will very, very much bigger, because the farmers are my stick. That's my stick.

I look at this, and the stick is still there. It has a sunset clause. We're giving them every benefit of the doubt to do the right thing here and to realize how important it is to have proper service out of the rail system. We're giving them every opportunity to do the honourable thing, to look at things as a function of the Canadian corporate sector being responsible back to the people it serves. We're giving them every benefit of the doubt. It's up to them to grab that olive branch, because the reality is that this is not enough. I think a lot of people around this room and in this sector would say that this is just a band-aid, which is what it really is.

A lot of people are looking at the review and saying that this is what needs to happen. We need to have a proper review. We actually have to make sure that the shippers have the ability to extract service out of CN and CP.

So they may want to go to school. They maybe want to go to Dale Carnegie and learn how to win friends and influence people. I'm not sure what course to recommend to these guys. But the reality is that the way they treated us this last winter, and in fact have treated us....

That's one of the confusions I have. Everybody looks back to the last winter. It's not last winter. This goes back for years. I've loaded Super-Bs on a Friday night and Saturday morning and had them on the road Sunday, showing up at a terminal four hours from my farm, only to be told that the train didn't show up the way it was supposed to.

When you have ten trucks in a row, what do you do with it? Where do you go? Everything else is full. They're also not my trucks, so I have to pay for them. There's no compensation back to me. There's not even an apology. It's just the way it is, so suck it up. That happens over and over and over again. I can remember at a small-town elevator in Canwood the farmers going to the elevator basically every morning to ask if there was any news on that train.

You know, it's just amazing. This last year was bad, there's no question about it. There was a lot of cold weather and everything else. But you know what? This is Canada. It gets cold. We drill oil, we mine, in the cold. All sorts of activities happen when it's cold. I think they need to figure it out. If we're running trains in cold weather, there has to be a way to keep the volume up in cold weather.

They can come here with lots of excuses, but the reality is that they need to come with solutions. They need to come back to us, through this transport review committee, and ask what the solutions are so that I can get timely service and get my pulses delivered to the ship in a timely manner. They have to care, and I don't think they care.

That's the thing I go back to my farmers on the prairies the most with. They realize that we can't fix this. I can't put more locomotives and people on the rail lines. They understand that. What they don't understand is the people who take their business for granted, who do not care, who smirk in their faces. They want us to kick them. They want them to feel it, and we're the ones there to do that.

So hey, if we don't see improvements out of this, if we don't see any improvements out of the rail review, if we go through the review and get status quo, there will be lots of big sticks coming out. If CN and CP don't understand that, well, I have this Dale Carnegie course that they can go to. Maybe they'll understand it after they go to that.

I'll leave it at that, because there will be a big stick if things don't change. We've just scratched the iceberg, I'd say.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

Thank you, Mr. Hoback.

Just so that we understand, should the motion by Madam Brosseau pass then G-3 would not proceed.

The motion moved is that the amendment G-1 be amended by deleting its second paragraph.

[An hon. member]

A recorded vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

(Motion negatived: nays 5; yeas 4 [See Minutes of Proceedings])

Shall G-1 carry?

[An hon. member]

A recorded vote.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

(Amendment agreed to: yeas 9; nays 0 [See Minutes of Proceedings])

I want to thank the committee that it was supported unanimously. I also understand the concern and debate that's happened, and that is good. It's good that we have had that.

Knowing now that G-1 has passed, G-2 and G-3 carry as consequential amendments.

Mr. Eyking.

[Mark Eyking, Liberal, Sydney—Victoria, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Of course, after last week's ruling by from the Speaker, you asked the committee members if we had any amendments to add to this amendment that's here, as long as it is relevant to the amendment that's put forward. I put one in front of committee on Friday when I sent it. I think you guys got it translated and it's to make an addition just before proposed clause 5.1(1).

I think, Mr. Chair, you have it in front of you, and so you could get it around to the committee to take a look at it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bev Shipley]

It's being distributed now.