Industry committee  In broad terms, it's the more serious things that happen. An occurrence can be an accident or an incident; that's the definition. An accident is something more serious, and an incident is something less serious. There are more technical definitions in our regulations, but that's

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, committee members. We appreciate the opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology. We will provide you with a brief overview of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada and the work we do, with a p

Transport committee  I'll have to go high level since there isn't a lot of time—

Transport committee  —but, basically, I think that even though the Auditor General found problems with the way Transport Canada was overseeing safety management systems in transportation, if you read that report carefully, the Auditor General is strongly endorsing the notion and the principle of a sa

Transport committee  I think that really was the thrust of the three recommendations we made in January. The first one is to get those class 111 tank cars out of there as soon as possible so that they are not running through our communities. The second is route planning and analysis, and following

Transport committee  They absolutely are further ahead in the United States.

Transport committee  We'd have to go back and see if there was a time period on that. Yes, it was put in place very quickly, but whether it will continue ad infinitum, I can't speak to that.

Transport committee  There are two ways of doing it. You can have the railways file their plans with Transport Canada and have Transport Canada review them, or they can do it on an audit basis, and go out and choose based on the highest risk and audit those sections. There are a couple of different o

Transport committee  Yes, that’s correct.

Transport committee  Kathy.

Transport committee  I'll ask Mr. Laporte to answer that question.

Transport committee  This is one of many issues that we are looking at in this ongoing investigation from a safety perspective.

Transport committee  In the United States, positive train control was required by Congress, so a number of railways on a number of lines in the United States are moving towards that. I understand it's quite a challenge in terms of technology and in terms of money. When we came to look at the situat

Transport committee  The devil is in the detail. I would think it would depend on exactly which fact situation you're talking about. As we have pointed out, there is certainly some room for improvement in the standards for the tank cars, for the operations, and for the emergency response.

Transport committee  It's primarily the responsibility of the individual companies, the railways. The regulator provides regulatory oversight, so they do audits for SMS. They do inspections on the ground. Those two are intended to complement one another.