I was at Lake Wabamun for eight weeks when this happened. I spent a lot of time there.
I must say that in the last 10 years, the industry has evolved enormously. I think the Lac-Mégantic incident brought our game to even newer levels. In the past, the railroads would get information about the types of commodities but not information about the volumes. Protective direction 32 was added as a regulation almost three or four years ago now. It requires railways to provide first responders and municipalities, including the mayor of a town who is in charge of first responding, information on dangerous commodities, by quarter, by volume, in their towns. That's first.
Second, in the last two and a half years of working with towns, I appreciated, as a former mayor myself—we have the former mayor of Surrey here as well—that when the requests came in, towns were saying that they didn't have access to real-time information. We said, okay, and we developed the AskRail app. Every first responder who registers in Canada has on his BlackBerry the capability to call up a railcar, anywhere in our system, and know what's in the car, if it's empty or loaded, and what's on the whole train.
Third, when a train leaves a station or a yard, the locomotive engineer or conductor must have the content of every car behind the train. In the case of an incident, if the first responder arrives at the incident and says to the locomotive conductor or engineer, “Can I please see the content of railcar 42?”, he will get the information.
That was still not enough. More recently, as you probably know, there have been new rules on risk assessments. Towns can register with us and have a discussion with the railway about risk assessments in their town. If tomorrow morning, in Lake Wabamun, the mayor or the chief of police or the chief of the fire department said they wanted to talk to CN about a risk assessment on a sensitive waterway and about what CN was doing, we would sit down and do so.
I must say to you that since I was at Wabamun 10 years ago, it has changed quite a bit. We have made an effort to address the concern of first responders and mayors about real-time information. I co-chair the proximity committee with Jenelle Saskiw.