Thank you, Mr. Benson. That's good to know. So the railroads are really only trying to keep the public from knowing what's going through their communities for public relations reasons, not for security reasons. At least, that's the impression we're left with.
The minister's safety directives last week are welcomed by all and I appreciate that they have dealt with some of the problem, but I don't believe they went far enough. The Transportation Safety Board made other recommendations that were not acted on. One was to avoid major population centres, like Toronto, by routing rail around the city. We have learned in this committee that the DOT-111s are not safe even at 20 miles an hour and there was no recommendation that these cars should go less than 20 miles an hour, which is what the public seems to be asking for. If we must have this stuff go through because you're not going to reroute it, can you not slow it down?
In addition, we found in this committee that neither CN nor CP seem to have taken into account the effect of abandonment of less populous lines at the time they decided to abandon them. So we asked them if they did a risk assessment when they abandoned those lines, and they said no. So now to Mr. Ballantyne, are you concerned? Is the freight association concerned about the fact that there are so few choices left for the transportation of dangerous goods, when they're abandoning lines in New Brunswick, when they abandoned the two Ottawa Valley lines, leaving no other choice but to go through heavily populated areas?