Bill C-52 (Historical)

Safe and Accountable Rail Act

An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act

This enactment amends the Canada Transportation Act to strengthen the liability and compensation regime for federally regulated railway companies by establishing minimum insurance levels for railway companies and a supplementary, shipper-financed compensation fund to cover damages resulting from railway accidents involving the transportation of certain dangerous goods.
Among other things, the amendments
(a) establish minimum insurance levels for freight railway operations based on the type and volume of goods that are transported;
(b) require the holder of a certificate of fitness to maintain the liability insurance coverage required by that Act, and to notify the Canadian Transportation Agency without delay if its insurance coverage is affected;
(c) establish that a railway company is liable, without proof of fault or negligence, subject to certain defences, for losses, damages, costs and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or other designated goods, up to the level of the company’s minimum liability insurance coverage; and
(d) establish a compensation fund in the Accounts of Canada, financed by levies on shippers, to cover the losses, damages, costs and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or other designated goods that exceed the minimum liability insurance coverage.
The enactment also amends the Railway Safety Act to, among other things,
(a) allow a province or municipality that incurs costs in responding to a fire that it is of the opinion was the result of a railway company’s railway operations to apply to the Canada Transportation Agency to have those costs reimbursed by the railway company;
(b) clarify the Governor in Council’s power to make regulations respecting the restriction and prevention of access to land on which a line of railway is situated, including by means of fences or signs on that land or on land adjoining it;
(c) authorize a railway safety inspector who is satisfied that there is an immediate threat to the safety or security of railway operations to order a person or company to take any measure that the inspector specifies to mitigate the threat;
(d) authorize the Minister to require, by order, a company, road authority or municipality to follow the procedures or take the corrective measures that the Minister specifies if the Minister considers it necessary in the interests of safe railway operations;
(e) provide the Governor in Council with a regulation-making power regarding the submission of information that is relevant to the safety of railway operations by any person, other than the Minister to any person;
(f) authorize the Minister to order a company that is implementing its safety management system in a manner that risks compromising railway safety to take the necessary corrective measures; and
(g) declare that certain regulations and orders that were made under the Railway Act are deemed to have had effect from the day on which they were made under that Act and that those regulations and orders continue to have effect from that day as if they were made under the Railway Safety Act.

Safe and Accountable Rail Act

[Lisa Raitt, Conservative, Halton, ON]

moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to commence third reading of Bill C-52, the safe and accountable rail act, which seeks to amend both the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act.

As parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport, I have the great privilege to be a member of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities and to have been able to take part in the study of this extremely important piece of legislation.

Before I speak to the important points raised during committee stage, I would like to take a few minutes to remind all members of this place of the important components of this legislation, beginning with the important amendments to the Canada Transportation Act.

As stated by the Minister of Transport at committee, the tragic Lac-Mégantic derailment has shown us that our liability and compensation regime for rail must be strengthened. The Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway only carried $25 million in third-party liability insurance, which we now know is not nearly enough to cover the incredible magnitude of the resulting damage and loss of both life and property that night.

With this bill, railways would be required to hold a mandatory level of insurance based on the type and volume of dangerous goods they carry. These levels would range from $25 million for short lines carrying limited or no dangerous goods to $1 billion for railways carrying significant amounts of dangerous goods, namely CN and CP.

These mandatory insurance requirements have been set based on analysis of historical accident costs, taking into account the severity of past accidents involving certain goods. These requirements would make certain that a railway's insurance directly reflects the risk associated with its operations.

These insurance levels were determined to be adequate to cover the cost of the vast majority of potential accidents and, while a scenario of the magnitude of Lac-Mégantic is an extremely rare occurrence, we want to be certain that all costs in such a case would be recovered.

That is why a supplementary shipper-financed fund would be created to provide compensation above the railway's insurance for accidents involving crude oil and any other goods added through regulation.

In the event of a rail accident involving crude oil, railways would be automatically liable, without the need to prove fault or negligence, up to their insurance level, and that would happen immediately.

The bill provides that they would be liable for all actual damages, which includes damages to people, property, and the environment. There would be certain defences to this strict liability. A railway, for example, would not be held liable if the accident were a result of war, hostilities, or civil insurrection such as a terrorist act, as these occurrences are outside of the railway's control. If accident costs reached beyond the railway's mandatory insurance level, the supplementary fund would cover the remaining damages.

For the supplementary fund, we have included a broad definition of crude oil in recognition of the serious damage that all crude can cause if released. Even a less-volatile crude can have a grave impact on the environment and result in very high remediation costs.

The fund would be financed through a levy on shippers of $1.65 per tonne of crude oil transported by federally regulated railways, indexed to inflation. The aim is to capitalize the fund to $250 million, which is an amount that would provide substantial additional coverage for crude oil accidents above the insurance levels. Based on a reasonable projection of oil-by-rail traffic growth in the coming years, we have determined that, with the $1.65 per tonne levy, we would reach that target in approximately five years.

That said, however, it is important to emphasize at this point that the $250 million capitalization is a target and not a cap. The bill would allow the Minister of Transport to discontinue or reimpose the levy as necessary.

This means that the levy could continue longer than five years should oil-by-rail traffic grow at lower than expected rates. It also means that the fund could be capitalized to a different amount should that be considered appropriate.

Just to be clear. The fund will cover all costs above the railway's insurance and will not be capped. In the unlikely event that damages from a crude oil accident surpass both the railway's insurance level and the amount in the supplementary fund, the government's consolidated revenue fund would back up the compensation fund and would be repaid through the levy.

Bill C-52 also propose amendments to the Railway Safety Act, which would seek to further strengthen the oversight of Canada's rail safety regime in certain areas. These include the following: first, a new power for the Minister of Transport to order a company to take corrective measures should that company's implementation of its safety management system risk compromise safe railway operations; second, a new authority to regulate the sharing of information, records and documents from one party to another, other than the department, for example, from a railway company to a municipality; third, to broaden railway safety inspectors' powers to intervene in a more effective way with any person or entity, including companies, road authorities, and municipalities, to mitigate threats to safety; fourth, a broader power for the Minister of Transport to require a railway company, road authority, or municipality, to stop any activity that might constitute a threat to safe railway operations, to follow any procedures, or taking any corrective measures specified; and, finally, a cost reimbursement scheme for provinces and municipalities that respond to fires determined to be caused by a railway company's operation.

Part of Transport Canada's prevention strategy has been to ensure the department has an effective oversight regime. This means both ensuring that industry is in compliance with the various rules and regulations that govern them and also responding to changes in the risk environment.

Transport Canada continuously examines and monitors its resource levels to adjust and reallocate, as needed, to address emerging issues, trends and higher-risk issues.

Transport Canada has further enhanced railway safety in Canada by establishing the following new or amended regulations: grade crossings regulations; railway operating certificate regulations; railway safety management system regulations, 2015; transportation information regulations; and railway safety administrative monetary penalties regulations.

Allow me to refer back to the review of the bill at the committee stage.

The review of Bill C-52 provided the opportunity for the committee members to examine, in detail, the text of the bill, its purpose and objectives. Particular issues were raised and the hon. Minister of Transport provided some important clarifications, which bear repeating in the House today.

First, the minister assured committee members that no additional financial resources would be required for the implementation of these new proposed authorities and requirements. The department's operational budget was assessed and represents the level of resources adequate to carry out all of the projects and the priorities. Nonetheless, in the event additional funding is requirement, the government always has the ability to reallocate or request funding through the supplementary estimates.

Second, with regard to the supplementary shipper-financed fund, the minister made a number of important clarifications. The fund has been proposed, through Bill C-52, to provide substantial additional coverage for incidents involving crude oil. The fund would cover any damages that surpassed the railway's required minimum insurance coverage. To finance the fund, the government would introduce a levy of $1.65 per tonne on shipments of crude oil transported by a federally regulated railway. The formula used to establish the levy would be based on a mid-range growth estimate of projected oil by rail. The supplementary shipper fund cannot apply retroactively for incidents that occur prior to the coming into force of the legislation.

As previously mentioned, the proposed supplementary fund would not be capped or cut off. Therefore, claims against the fund would not be limited. The fund would be capitalized to $250 million. However, Bill C-52 would allow the Minister of Transport to suspend or reinstate the levy as would be necessary. This would ensure that the fund would be at the appropriate level to pay for damages in excess of railway insurance levels without holding excess capital unnecessarily.

The government modelled this compensation fund on the ship-source oil pollution fund in the marine mode. Levies for that fund were suspended once it had been capitalized. The fund has grown through interest over the past 40 years without the need for further levies. For the time being, the supplementary compensation fund will cover incidents involving crude oil.

However, the bill provides regulation-making authority to include other types of dangerous goods in the future. Moreover, Bill C-52 provides for a loan from the consolidated revenue fund if the resources in the fund have been exhausted. This loan would be subject to terms and conditions established by the Minister of Finance and would be repaid through the shipper levy.

Furthermore, this bill includes the authority to put in place a special levy on railways to help repay the CRF loan to ensure that liability continues to be shared appropriately in the event of a catastrophic accident. The funds would be supplementary to the newly proposed minimum liability insurance coverage for railway companies transporting dangerous goods.

The strengthened liability and compensation regime in the bill is in line with the modernized liability and compensation regime put forward for pipelines in Bill C-46, as well as the regime for offshore oil and gas in Bill C-22, which received royal assent on February 26. This includes a provision that ensures that the strengthened regime for rail would not preclude any other regimes, including future regimes with higher limits of liability from being applied to a railway accident.

It is also important to highlight the clarification made by the Minister of Transport at committee regarding subclause 152.7(1) of the bill. Through this subclause, only a railway company that is involved in a crude oil accident through physical operation of a railway, for example, moving a train or responsibility for tracks or cars, would be held liable without regard to fault or negligence.

In the Canada Transportation Act the terms “operate” and “railway” are defined in section 87 of the act. They are defined in a physical sense, not a commercial sense. Therefore, a carrier that quotes a through-rate or interswitches with a railway company that later has an accident would not be considered involved in an accident. With this strengthened liability and compensation regime for rail, the minister clearly stated in committee that she was confident, and “we do have the ability to ensure that the polluter pays and that taxpayers don't have to incur costs”.

The minister confirmed to committee members that where a crude oil accident was the result of an act of terrorism, the railway company would not be held automatically liable under our proposed legislation.

Finally, the committee discussed the cumbersome definition of “fatigue science” presently found in the Railway Safety Act. As stated by the minister, the definition included in the act is simply a definition of a term and does not add any implementation requirements toward the railway companies. By having the term predefined, it restricted the department's ability to enforce. Amendments to the act seek to remove the definition allowing the application instead of the new Railway Safety Management System Regulations, 2015, to fulfill its purpose of ensuring a company's safety management system includes mechanisms for applying the principles of fatigue science when scheduling the work of certain employees.

Following the Lac-Mégantic derailment, the Speech from the Throne in 2013 and the Auditor General of Canada's fall 2013 report, our government has worked to bring forward these amendments to strengthen railway safety in Canada and increase the industry's accountability. Within this process, consultation with our stakeholders, particularly on liability and compensation, was essential to achieve the results we see today in this bill. We are grateful for their collaboration, support and commitment to improve the safety and security of the railway system.

I urge all members to vote in favour of Bill C-52 so it can be referred to the other place as soon as possible.

[Wayne Marston, NDP, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Essex for providing some background on the development of the bill.

From 1965 to 1974, I worked on the Canadian National Railway in the signal department. Over that period of time, which is an awful long time ago to today, there has been a change in the maintenance of the track and most of the equipment. I can recall as boy my father was a section man. We could look down a track and see that it was completely level and the spacing between the rails was perfect. It was maintained to a very high degree. Today I do not see that.

In essence, we agree with the bill and the direction it goes in, but one of the things I found surprising, and it was illustrated to us by a couple of people from outside of the rail system, was the fact that tankers carrying chlorine were not part of this as well as some other very dangerous chemicals. I am very curious as to why it is only oil.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think all of us in the House would agree on this. The practice of using slow speed by railway companies is no substitute for proper track maintenance. We expect rail companies to ensure that their property is well maintained in that way.

When it comes to the regime that has been instituted with respect to liability and compensation contained in Bill C-52, we did extensive consultations. One of the things that we are grappling with as a recent phenomenon has been the tremendous growth in the transport of crude oil by rail. By crude, I mean the many different forms, including the highly-flammable Bakken formation oil as well. That was the particular dangerous good involved in the tragic Lac-Mégantic derailment. We wanted to ensure we had an adequate regime for that.

The member will know that the bill does contain a provision in it for the regime to be expanded at any point in the future to deal with other dangerous goods, should that be determined necessary.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to some of the comments my colleague made. We sit together on committee. I want to remind Canadians about a few things in the bill and the context within which it is situated.

The first context, and the first important point to remind Canadians of, is that on April 23 at committee, I asked the minister 10 consecutive times to come clean with Canadians with respect to the budget at Transport Canada in the estimates this year. Now the member will get up and say that those are not the real numbers, that the Conservatives rely on what the officials say. However, the reality is that the government calls the shots, and everybody knows it. Departments are allocated their resources, and everybody knows it.

Point one is that the budget at Transport Canada was cut 11% percent this year, or $202 million. Canadians should remember that when the Conservative government talks about rail safety. That is 11% in one department. More money was spent last year, $42 million, on economic action plan advertising, with $33 million on rail safety. That is point number one to remember.

Point two is that the bill was rushed through committee. It was a Conservative-dominated committee with two meetings. Here is what the major witnesses said when I asked if they were consulted.

Phil Benson, Teamsters, said, “As far as I know, not at all”.

Robert Taylor, CP, said, “We got an answer when we saw the legislation”.

James Beardsley, Marsh Canada, said, “the answer I got was that it was not made available to them”, which is the briefing he provided.

Could the member explain those two points please? How does he expect people to do better with rail safety when the budget has been slashed 11%. Also, the top sectors in the country were not consulted.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I only wish there were more facts involved in that particular intervention.

As the member will know if he studies the estimates, investments in front-line safety in every single mode of transport are up this year. That is in marine, rail, air safety, every single mode.

The department has suggested what resources it needs. Obviously, that is what the main estimates are for. There are also supplementary estimates should it become clear that the department needs additional resources to carry out its mandate.

Make no mistake that Bill C-52 is the product of extensive consultations, particularly when it comes to the liability and compensation regimes. We have heard from the railway companies that they would rather not have strict liability insurance. They do not want the strict measures that are in this particular bill. I would expect that from the railway companies. That is fair enough; they can take that position. The government, though, after that consultation and after listening to their position has determined that they will face tougher insurance levels, that there will be strict liability and therefore we will not have to prove their claims in court up to the maximum level of their liability.

Shippers also will share in that particular liability and compensation regime. They did not want to do that either, but we know that is the right way to go. Canadians support us in enhancing our system.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie]

Mr. Speaker, I spent a lot of time working around the edges of the railroad industry in my past, and I understand. Many of the members opposite alluded to the fact that it is a continental industry, the United States and Canada. The rolling stock, crews and all kinds of equipment go across the border. It is an integrated industry.

I would like my colleague to expand on what the United States is doing. How do the Canadian regulations with respect to the shipper pays levy, as well as the compensation and liability regime, compare to what the United States is doing? To what extent were there discussions with the United States to make sure there were some similarities between our regimes?

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that is an important question.

With respect to an industry that has tremendous integration, as we can imagine, these railway locomotives and their rolling stock travel across the border and back many times carrying all kinds of goods and services to keep our economies moving. What is important in terms of an integrated approach is on the regulatory side, the way we look at design specifications, for example, for the new robust tankers that will replace the old DOT-111s, and ultimately the CPC-1232s in carrying crude oil, strong standards that are united to deal with the issue of these tanker cars that move back and forth.

Our liability and compensation regimes are different, though. For example, in the United States, if there is a railway accident involving dangerous goods, the government or any other party would have to go to court to prove their claims against a railway company. We just do not think that is the right approach.

What we have adopted after consultations with important stakeholders is an approach where we have both shared liability with railway companies and the shippers themselves. The railway companies will be required to carry strong levels of insurance, be they short-line or class 1 railways, and no provable claims against that. We do not have to go to court to prove a claim against that.

Should the costs of compensation exceed the railway company's insurance, we have the supplemental shippers fund that is not capped, but gives us strong room to grow to ensure that the polluter pays in the unfortunate case of an accident.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport for his speech. I agree with my colleague who spoke about problems related to inspections and replacing tracks, but I want to talk about the problems with the bill.

This bill contains several levels of minimum insurance coverage. As my colleague knows, I asked a question in committee pertaining mainly to class 1 railway companies. They must now have minimum insurance coverage of $1 billion. However, we learned that these companies, including CN and CP, already had accident insurance coverage of over $1.1 billion. They have perhaps $1.5 billion in coverage.

I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary why the government agreed to a lower level of coverage than what the companies are already paying now.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Mr. Speaker, that was not an established fact at committee. I know that the opposition members hinted that they thought that was the case. Officials who were repeatedly queried on that could not divulge, because of proprietary concerns, what level of insurance the railway companies carry.

We know from the Canadian Transportation Agency that the $1 billion that is instituted is supportable in the current insurance market and that it will be strict liability. No one has to go to court to prove fault or negligence against a railway company in the case of an accident where dangerous goods are involved. That is a tremendous step forward when it comes to improving rail safety in this country.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-52 at third reading.

As the NDP transport critic and vice-chair of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, I found it interesting to study this bill.

I agree with the Liberal member who said in his question that there was not enough consultation and perhaps not enough study. Indeed, the study period was relatively short for such an important bill.

Let me be clear: the NDP will support the bill. We believe that the polluter pays principle is important. Clearly, it was only after the Lac-Mégantic tragedy that the government finally decided to do something about rail safety. Unfortunately, it took a tragedy to finally spur the government to action, a tragedy that cost 47 people their lives, cost millions of dollars in damages and ruined many other lives.

It is sad that previous Liberals governments and the current government have been ignoring rail safety, the very principle of our rail system, ever since the Liberals privatized it. The problems only started when they privatized everything. They also left all the regulations, even inspections, up to the rail companies themselves. As we often say, the system that was implemented is based on self-regulation, and all the companies do their own audits and inspections. That is very clear.

This bill does have some very important points. As I have said from the beginning, we support the polluter pays principle. Obviously, it is not up to the public to pay for damages caused by the industry.

In the case of the Lac-Mégantic accident, MMA had only $25 million in liability insurance. When I asked the minister and Transport Canada officials about the cost, I was not able to get any firm figures, since the numbers vary. Apparently, $400 million has already been spent to repair damages. However, it could cost billions of dollars in the end. That is a huge amount of money.

Unfortunately, governments must pay because MMA filed for bankruptcy. The federal and the Quebec government had to spend money to repair the damage. When I refer to damage, I am also referring to the damage caused by the Conservative government for allowing self-regulation at a time when the rail transportation of crude oil has increased exponentially.

As for the budget, we see that there are gaps, and that has been raised many times. The government says it is taking action. However, there are budget cuts.

Let us look at just the office responsible for rail safety, the people who specifically look after implementing the system and ensuring that it is safe. We see that between 2010 and 2015, there were cuts of about 20%. Those cuts affected the people who look after rail safety and ensure the safety of Canadians. That shows that the government does not have its priorities straight.

We agree that there must be minimum liability levels. Once again, we deplore the fact that this was not the case earlier and that a company like MMA, with respect to Lac-Mégantic, only had $25 million in insurance coverage.

This bill is certainly a step in the right direction. It contains various categories for many rail companies, which will have to have minimum insurance levels based on the volume of dangerous goods shipped via its rail lines.

However, I asked the parliamentary secretary a question about the calculations. We wanted to know whether the amount established was sufficient. I gave the example of class 1 railways, like CN and CP, that have minimum insurance coverage of $1 billion. We learned from the news or other studies that these companies probably already had insurance coverage in excess of $1 billion.

Ultimately, the government reduced the amount of insurance coverage companies are required to have, when the purpose of the bill is to increase it.

Unfortunately, as the parliamentary secretary mentioned, when we asked questions in committee we were told that the information belonged to the railway companies. However, the government has the power to get that information. The Conservatives are the ones who did the study regarding the insurance limit, and once again, they are not being transparent. That is shameful.

The parliamentary secretary spoke about the additional powers granted to inspectors and to the minister in cases where tracks are not safe. That makes me think about what happened in Gogama, in northern Ontario, where other derailments occurred. They happened despite the events at Lac-Mégantic and the public outcry in regard to the dangers associated with the transportation of dangerous goods by rail. I think that, like me, any Canadians who saw the pictures were shocked to find out that this type of derailment is still happening. Cars carrying crude oil are still exploding.

The parliamentary secretary told us that the government introduced new standards for the DOT-111 cars, which will eventually be replaced. However, it will be another 10 years before they are all replaced. These cars will still be on our tracks for another 10 years, even though the Transportation Safety Board described them as dangerous and unsafe. The TSB said that these cars were essentially the same as the old DOT-111 cars that exploded in Lac-Mégantic.

This concern has to be taken into consideration. I am asking the government to set a deadline and show more leadership when it comes to protecting the public.

There is also the issue of inspectors and self-inspection. The system that was put in place and that has the support of the Liberals allows companies to do their own inspections before potentially, maybe, submitting them to Transport Canada for inspection.

The Auditor General issued a scathing report on rail safety. He said that the inspectors overseeing the safety of the system did not fulfill their obligations and that all they do is look at the rail company's plans without ensuring that they effectively protect the environment and the public. That is a problem.

Another problem with inspectors has existed for a long time. Let us take the example of the derailments in Gogama, which caused explosions. According to the TSB's preliminary report, the condition of the rails was definitely a factor. When we talk about inspectors, the government responds that the companies do the inspections themselves and that it expects companies to properly inspect their rails. However, it is careless to rely on self-inspection.

Before the events in Lac-Mégantic in 2013, there were 116 rail inspectors at Transport Canada. After the events in Lac-Mégantic, there were 117. The government added just one inspector. It seems that others were hired, but they are not officially assigned to rail safety.

What is certain is that all of the workers and unions in this sector agree that there is a problem with inspection. Even the rail companies, as well as the Railway Association of Canada, report the same problem. It is clear that there is a problem.

The government, meanwhile, is addressing this problem by making budget cuts. It makes no sense.

How can the government say that it cares about the safety of Canadians and then turn around and cut the budgets of those who conduct inspections and make sure that laws are in place and that the companies are complying with them, as well as ensuring that the rail lines themselves are safe? It is shameful.

As for the polluter pays principle, I applaud the fact that the bill provides for a compensation fund. Unfortunately, as my NDP colleague mentioned in his question, this fund applies only to accidents or disasters involving crude oil.

One question was raised by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs and a number of other stakeholders who appeared before the committee. Why did the government not include other dangerous goods? The Conservatives were asked that question today. They replied that they were studying the issue and they would see. Do we need to have another accident like the one in Lac-Mégantic for them to realize that something has to be done? It is important to raise this issue. This is not about demagoguery. The government did indeed act after the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. The government has even said that this bill resulted from that tragedy. Why not also include a compensation fund for other dangerous materials, since that is a concern and the municipalities and first responders are asking for it?

Let us come back to firefighters. A question about training was raised by the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, a question that we had also brought forward. Yes, the aim is to prevent accidents. However, prevention depends on inspection. As we know, the government is failing in that regard. What must be done to prevent an accident, or at least to respond quickly when one does occur? How can we ensure that first responders are properly trained and that they have the resources they need?

Unfortunately, this bill is silent on that issue. This is what firefighters, among others, proposed: since there is already a fund in place—once again, I am referring to the fund established from fees paid by oil companies—why not use it to pay for training to ensure that first responders, firefighters and those who respond to emergencies receive the training they need?

This problem has been flagged and it is a serious problem, especially because we are shipping more and more dangerous goods by rail. Furthermore, based on the Lac-Mégantic accident and what is happening in the United States, for example, we can say goods are increasingly dangerous and there is less and less information about these goods. That was clearly the case in Lac-Mégantic. The dangerous nature of the goods being moved was underestimated.

Legislators or those who implement the regulations are not well informed. What about the people who respond to emergencies? What we are asking for is simple. We are asking for a fund to cover training for first responders such as firefighters and paramedics. How do we intervene in this situation? The Lac-Mégantic accident opened our eyes.

The bill could have covered this, but unfortunately it does not. There is still work to be done. As I said, the NDP will support the bill and hopes that it will pass quickly. However, there is still a lot of work to be done.

In committee, an amendment did not pass. It dealt with fatigue, or what is known as fatigue management.

The bill actually repeals a clause, repeals the definition of fatigue management, and we do not understand why. Just to be clear, what the definition basically said is that we have to base fatigue management on science, and what we are doing here is actually repealing that definition.

I asked the minister and officials, and the answer was not satisfactory. I think we want to make sure that we have a base, and our base was the definition of fatigue management, fatigue science. It was scientifically based, but unfortunately, that was deleted.

We will have to take a close look at the regulations. Unfortunately, from our perspective, the approach was going in the wrong direction.

We did not anticipate one of the other consequences that witnesses told us about in committee, namely the fact that some companies do not do the same kind of transportation for dangerous goods. Some companies transfer oil and other goods in certain places. These companies, therefore, do not transport goods the same way and do not have the same problems. This concern was raised, and I asked questions about it. I was told that these cases can be addressed through regulations. I asked the question clearly and openly, and now we will have to follow up. We have to figure out how to treat companies that do not pose the same risk but that transport goods that are, by definition, dangerous. We have heard that the costs can be quite high for these small companies. We are talking about smaller companies that might not have the means to pay for this insurance. As legislators, we need to trust Transport Canada and its officials to take that into consideration. We will keep a close eye on this issue.

There is something else we are disappointed in. It was already mentioned, and that is the fact that the environment has been put on the back burner. Certain priorities have been set out in the bill. We agree that municipalities or individuals who are victims of accidents should be compensated and helped at any cost. There is no doubt that they must compensated. However, the wording of the bill puts long-term environmental impacts in the back seat. The request cannot necessarily come from an individual who says he can no longer use a certain natural resource for the long term, a river for example, and that his rights have been violated in the long term. According to the current wording of the bill, only the government can go after the railways and say that they caused damage that undermines the long-term use of the environment. However, we know that in fact the government does not do that. It will not go after a company for damages. We are a bit surprised to see that this aspect does not have the same priority in the bill. We would have preferred it to be considered on an equal footing.

I would like to come back to the question that we asked ourselves: why did the government not go further in terms of coverage for dangerous materials? The reason I am mentioning this again is that the committee was almost unanimous in this regard. Firefighters, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the oil industry all asked us why the bill only went after oil companies or crude oil and why it did not provide for a fund that would cover other dangerous goods, since we know that other dangerous materials are being transported on our tracks. I asked the government that question. I was told that the matter was being looked into. I would have liked a more concrete answer.

However, we did obtain a more concrete answer in regard to what the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport said about the cars. He said that there will be new standards for the cars. However, the United States announced that a braking system will be implemented and gave us a timeline.

The government established a deadline of 10 years for oil cars, but as we said, we would like that deadline to be shorter. The United States said that the braking system for cars was a safer system. Unfortunately, the government did not give a deadline in that regard in its announcement.

The government told us that it was looking into the issue, but it has not even set a deadline yet.

We need to learn from our mistakes. Twenty years ago, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said that the DOT-111 cars were dangerous. The Liberal government did not do anything about it. The federal government did not do anything either and the Lac-Mégantic tragedy occurred. We need to think about that. The government needs to act quickly, show some leadership and protect the public.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the speech by the NDP's transport critic. I must correct a few of the member's statements. When he said that the government has reduced the number of inspectors, he knows that that is untrue. We have been significantly increasing the number of rail inspectors for many years now.

The changes regarding the regulations for insurance and money for cleanup in the event of an accident are significant. The member himself said he wanted these changes to be put in place quickly. This is an important bill that he will surely support. Will he tell us that today?

We are at third reading stage of this bill. We had a lot of debates at second reading and we even studied the bill in committee. The Canadian—or even North American—public expects us to bring in a modern compensation and insurance regime, especially in light of the serious issues associated with transporting dangerous goods.

Can he promise that they will stop prolonging the debate? We are having an important debate today, and there is no use repeating the same arguments for weeks. At the end of today can we put an end to this debate and hold a vote?

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie for his question.

I would like to start by correcting the statements he made in his preamble. He said that I said the government had reduced the number of inspectors and that that was false. That is not what I said. I said that the budget for inspectors had been cut. If the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie were to look at the budget, he would see that it shrank by nearly 20% from 2010 to 2015.

As to the number of inspectors, I said that had gone up. That is true. In 2013, before Lac-Mégantic, there were 116 inspectors. After Lac-Mégantic, after all of the debates we had, after all of the inspection problems and all of the people's concerns, how many more inspectors are there? Just one. So yes, that is an increase, but when the number of inspectors goes up by just one, I think that is a bit of a problem.

In answer to his question, I am not the one who controls the House. Personally, I feel that this bill is important. I supported it. Still, it is important to have a debate. I know that the government is in the habit of imposing time allocation, and has done so 95 or 96 times now because it does not like hearing what we have to say. If my colleague had listened to my speeches, he would know that I talked about the amendments and the topics we discussed in committee. This is the first time I am doing this because this is the first time we have seen the committee's report. I think it is important to have dialogue and debate.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am a little astounded hearing the comments of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Clearly, he does not know what is happening with this bill and he has not been present in committee.

One of the big problems with this bill, 57 pages and counting, is what the Conservative majority in committee did. It circumscribed all of the expert witnesses to two meetings. That is two meetings of two hours each. In the most important single meeting that was held on this question of liability insurance, the four principal witnesses who testified, a large railroad, a short-haul railroad, the number one insurance company in the railway insurance business and the Teamsters union, all said there is a series of unintended consequences in the bill, a series of shortfalls, misgivings and changes in the statute that are going to lead to serious litigation. No legal opinions were rendered.

What we really have is a situation where the government is rushing this legislation through pursuant to the Lac-Mégantic tragedy, but, more importantly, with the deadline of the election in the fall very much in its window.

Maybe my colleague from the NDP can comment and try to help us divine why it is the government, instead of doing its homework with proper stakeholder outreach and negotiation to improve this bill, is so incredibly pigheaded about rushing this through in a form that is not complete.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it is always a pleasure to sit with the member on the transport committee. Yes, as he knows we did not have a lot of meetings on this bill at committee.

It is true that consultation is important, but what was mostly of concern to me is the lack of information. Again, when I asked about the liability issue, especially how much the class 1 railways were paying, we did not get the answer. It is hard for us as legislators to be able to say whether this bill is the best one in terms of how it was drafted, why it was drafted or why those provisions are there. Some of the comments we made were not acceptable for the other side.

There could have been more consultation and discussion, but at the end of the day I do agree that this bill is a step in the right direction. It talked about polluter pay and we have always said that Canadians should not have to pay for this, but there will be unintended consequences. What I was saying in my speech is that we will have to follow up. We will have to ensure that this legislation and the regulations that come with it are correct.

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Brossard—La Prairie for his speech.

One of the troubling aspects of this bill—because the devil is often in the details—is the removal of the definition of “fatigue science” that already appears in the Railway Safety Act. People need to be aware of the fact that in all areas of transportation, managing fatigue is an ongoing challenge. For instance, when it comes to highway transportation, the provinces have legislated the issue. Truck drivers have to keep log books.

On the rail side, obviously, given that trains operate day and night and cover very long distances, this is a very serious problem, and the NDP brought forward an amendment in committee that, unfortunately, was ruled out of order by the chair.

I wonder if my colleague could talk about the problem of fatigue and what the witnesses reported regarding the risks associated with removing that definition.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Beauport—Limoilou for his question, because that is indeed a very important issue. Unfortunately, we did not talk about it enough, but the fact that this bill removes the definition of fatigue management is important.

A definition already existed. Essentially, it said that fatigue management must be based on science. It is rather perplexing that the Conservatives removed it. We were told that it was a little too complicated and resulted in criteria that were too strict. However, that science exists in other industries and other sectors, such as aviation safety and road safety. This science exists. We do not find it overly complicated. On the contrary, when we talk about managing fatigue, it is about safety, not just the safety of employees, but also that of the public. It is therefore appalling that the government decided to do this.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to join this debate. This is a profoundly important issue for Canadians. It has been lingering now for almost a decade under the Conservatives and has been brought to the fore as a result of the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic, where so many vulnerable and innocent people either lost their lives or their families were touched. In fact, the entire community was destroyed.

As a result of that wake-up call, the government has been reacting. What we are here to debate today is frankly how it has been reacting. What we have seen is a series of dribs and drabs and slow release of technical and regulatory amendments and bills. This is part of that process.

First, it is important to step back for a second and remind Canadians what this bill is really all about, which is changing the way we establish minimum insurance levels for railway companies that are regulated by the federal government. Second, it intends to create a new compensation fund that would cover damages that arise from railway accidents involving the transportation of not all but certain kinds of dangerous goods. That is what this bill is really all about.

When the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport spoke a moment ago he mentioned that the government knows without a doubt that the amount of money that it is calling upon the industrial sector to make available in insurance and in this compensation fund is a sufficient amount of money. I would ask how he would know that. We asked the minister, the parliamentary secretary, the officials from Transport Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Railway Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs and beyond how much the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic has cost thus far. No answer is forthcoming.

The mayor of Lac-Mégantic told us that at minimum it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500 million. That is half a billion for an accident in a smaller town. We were also told by the ecological experts that that amount of money would have been considerably higher had there not been a layer of natural clay in the subsoil in that area that prevented the seepage of fossil fuels into the aquifers below, which would have produced almost unquantifiable damages to the natural ecosystem in the region. Therefore, when the government states that it has the truth and the answer, that it knows that $1 billion or $1.5 billion is sufficient, I would ask this. What if, heaven forbid, an accident like the one that occurred at Lac-Mégantic occurred in downtown Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa or Vancouver? I think the government would be singing a very different tune.

I raise this straight up at the beginning of my remarks to illustrate the kind of obfuscation, subterfuge and unwillingness to come clean with Canadians that we have seen from the government on rail safety over the last several years. It is no surprise. The first fact for Canadians to remember is that this is the fifth Minister of Transport in eight years. That tells us that the current government's ministers of transport have been transiting through the department, whether upward, downward or out of cabinet. That indicates that the government has been putting in a number of individuals, not taking this portfolio seriously, not until of course this horrible tragedy at Lac-Mégantic happened upon all of us. That is important for us to remember.

The second fact that the government does not want made public but would rather deny, bob and weave, or create fictitious responses for, is that it is categorically and undeniable slashing funding. It is killing funding when it comes to rail safety. In fact, rail safety funding financing is down 20% over the last five years, year by year.

This year, for Canadians who follow these things, we are all being bombarded with obscene, unwarranted, unjustifiable advertising. Most recently it is the Prime Minister's own 24/7 channel, the vanity video channel he has that records him every week and broadcasts at considerable taxpayer expense. As they say in French, “c'est du jamais-vu au Canada ”. It has never been seen before. We know this year alone the government is spending $42 million on economic action plan advertising. That is a number Canadians have a hard time getting their heads around, so let us juxtapose it in a meaningful way. There is $42 million for economic action plan advertising and $34 million for rail safety. There is $42 million for advertising and $34 million for rail safety. That is the priority of the Conservative regime.

What the Conservatives are doing by subterfuge, by stealth, by miscommunicating, by misleading Canadians, frankly, is they are trying to create an impression that they are on top of this profoundly important public safety issue called rail safety. They are not.

The Conservatives have been consistently and repeatedly warned, first by the Auditor General several years ago who came out and said in practical terms, that we agree with the notion of a safety management system, unlike the NDP, but as Ronald Reagan might have said, trust but verify.

It is the verification where the government as the regulator of a regulated sector is falling short, mostly falling short. The Conservatives cannot stand up and look constituents in the eyes and say that they have enough inspectors, because they do not. They cannot stand up and say that they have enough qualified inspectors, because they do not. They cannot stand up and tell us that they are properly trained and not coming primarily from the private sector that is regulated, because that is not true either. That is in fact where they are coming from.

There is a capacity problem inside Transport Canada. A department that is filled with good people, passionate, dedicated public servants, is being cash starved by a government spending $42 million on economic action plan advertising. As a result, it is our view that the government is putting Canadians at risk. Do not take our word for it; take the word of the Auditor General.

VIA Rail in a three-year or four-year audit period was not audited once by Transport Canada. VIA Rail carries over four million passengers a year, and it was not audited once. The systems safety audit that ought to have been accomplished was not done once. In fact, the government's own numbers indicate it is only completing 25% of the audits they themselves say are necessary to keep rails safe.

It is absurd to hear senior members of the government claim that things are getting better and that they have made so much progress in these dribs and drabs releases. It is not true.

We have a problem; we have a cultural problem in the government. I hate to go back to this, but it is important because past behaviour often indicates a propensity for future behaviour.

There are at least five remaining front-line ministers in the government who were in Ontario when the Walkerton water crisis hit the province. When that crisis hit the province, they all stood up in Ontario and used the same language we heard here today. “We can adjust based on the estimates with supplementary estimates.” “It is the officials who tell us that is enough money to conduct rail safely in the country.” These are the same buzzwords and the same sloganeering that we heard right after the Walkerton crisis, where people died and lots of people got sick.

In fact, in the report by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, five or six of these front-line ministers were singled out as contributing to the Walkerton crisis. Why? They slashed the funding. There was not a sufficient number of water inspectors, just as there is not a sufficient number of qualified rail inspectors today. This is the same story.

One would think that the government would have learned from the terrible tragedy at Lac-Mégantic, but it has not. That is the context within which this bill has been brought to the House for third reading.

When the minister came to committee, I asked her not once, not twice, and I did this on purpose, I asked her ten consecutive times why she had cut the budget by 11% for Transport Canada, for a total of $202 million cut from the budget. She denied it. I asked her again and again. Finally, she turned to her officials and said that they gave her the numbers, that it was their responsibility, and they said that is all the money they need. Nobody believes this. That is not how governments work. Budgets are allocated. The Treasury Board sits down with finance. The PMO overrules, agrees or disagrees, and the money is allocated.

We have a situation where these choices have been made at the highest levels of government. I asked her ten times, and ten times she denied it.

It is funny because the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that those are the numbers. The Library of Parliament's research says that those are numbers. We are hard-pressed to understand why the government will not come clean. Why will the government not just simply say that it is making a choice, that it is cutting the funding for Transport Canada and cutting rail safety by 20%?

When it comes to the testimony of the experts that we rely on in this place and who bring a perspective that is invaluable to improving legislation, not necessarily perfecting it, but certainly improving it, the Conservative majority on the committee brought the hammer down and said that there shall be no more than two meetings of two hours each. It is serious. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars of insurance coverage. My prediction is we are talking about billions of dollars in litigation that will follow this bill, because it was not thought through legally. The government said that there shall be two two-hour meetings.

When I pushed the four top witnesses on this very issue, they all admitted that, in fact, they had not been properly consulted at all. They had never had a chance to dialogue properly with the department. They had serious, profound questions about the insurance implications, the distributive effects, employment implications, trade competitiveness implications, and beyond. That is what has happened here.

As I said earlier, in my view, there is no greater responsibility of a government than to keep its citizens safe. Canadians today are rightly concerned about rail safety. They are very worried about rail safety, and it is not just the terrible Lac-Mégantic tragedy. We have had three major derailments in the province of Ontario in the last three months. There have been many more in the United States.

The Transportation Safety Board warned the government about the DOT-111 cars. The Transportation Safety Board looked at the northern Ontario accident and confirmed that the new standard brought by the government was not satisfactory. The government came out and said that it has a three-year phase-out and retrofit schedule for DOT-111s, which it knew was false, but it had to put something in the window, instead of slowing down, taking a bit of time and coming up with a better projection and a better plan for the phase-out of the cars that are dangerous.

That is just not the way it operates. The Conservatives had to say something to Canadians. They were really frightened of this file, so as a result they had to make an announcement, even though they know and were told by the number one company in the country that retrofits to these cars are technically impossible to do. The minister was told by her own advisory committee that it is technically impossible to do. The Conservatives announced it.

People are concerned. Recently, many of my caucus colleagues held a very public, large town hall in Toronto on rail safety. They have since written to the minister herself. They said that they are “worried about the massive increase in shipments of crude oil by train, up from 500 tank cars in 2009 to an estimated 110,000 tank cars in 2014”. We are reminded that the minister's spending on rail safety, as I said, is down 20% since 2009-10. She cannot deny it. The numbers are there. “Northern Ontario”, they go on to say, “saw three derailments in less than a month between February and March”. They raised concerns about the accuracy of the current speed limits on trains routed through Toronto and for that matter, all urban centres in the country, whether trains with dangerous materials should be routed through highly populated neighbourhoods at all. Is that a discussion we are having here? Never.

Band-aid after band-aid after band-aid, image after image after image, rolled out of technical dribs and drabs has been the response to the wake-up call of Lac-Mégantic. It does not cut it. It is not good enough.

We have tried to work collaboratively with the government. I think there are many MPs on the government side themselves who are dissatisfied with this response, because they are feeling the heat from their own constituents, as they should, as we all should, because we have an obligation to get this better for Canadians.

It is hard for us to square a number of other technical parts of the bill which I want to turn to. One is that the parliamentary secretary got up and said, in fact quoting the minister, that they have been assured that there are no financial implications for the bill, no additional costs in bringing in a 59-page bill. Really?

I asked the director general of the Canadian Transportation Agency whether that was true, and she could not answer, because now one of the things the bill does is it actually takes away litigation and gives a new responsibility to the Canadian Transportation Agency to adjudicate, to decide on how much compensation should be paid if there is an accident if a claim is made by a municipality or province. They admitted in testimony that they are not qualified to do it. The director general of the Canadian Transportation Agency said that they will think it through later. They have to get it done. There is an election coming October 19. They have to get it done.

There is one technical gap. Another is related to a really important legal liability issue where the test as to who is responsible if there is a railway accident has been changed by one stroke of a pen. I want to finish with this, because I predict this is going to cause all kinds of problems. Now a railway company that operates a railway which is involved in a railway accident, simply involved, the problem with that is railways often pass goods on from one railway to another, so who is involved? Who will pay the compensation? Whose insurance company will indemnify for the cost? This is completely unclear.

The Conservatives were warned. They had legal opinions that told them this was a real problem going forward. They were told it would lead to difficulty getting insurance coverage and difficulty later on with litigation, but they ignored it. It was brought to them in committee by me, by others, by their technical experts.

It is unfortunate that we missed the opportunity to take the time we need to improve things for Canadians when it comes to rail safety, because we need our railways. They are a big part of the engine of the economy. I think right now we have an obligation to go back and build on this bill and get it better.

[Robert Chisholm, NDP, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I listened intently to the member for Ottawa South, the critic for transportation for the Liberal Party. I did not once hear him explain why it is that the Liberal Party, when it was the government starting back in the 1990s initiated the deregulation, not only in the transportation industry, but in food inspection and other important areas where regulation is needed. I think we have come to learn that self-regulation by industries does not work.

I was hoping he might acknowledge that. The points he made about the flaws in the system, the weaknesses, the lack of action by the current government to actually respond to some of the serious problems that are being created on our railways, are absolutely true. However, I wonder if he would not acknowledge the fact that a lot of this originated with the decision by the previous Liberal government to deregulate and not actually respond to the transportation board's claims that the DOT-111 rail cars were a problem.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this is a good opportunity for me to perhaps help the member understand a bit better how it works.

The safety management systems are supported by the Transportation Safety Board and by the Auditor General. The approach in a safety management system admits that there are at least two parties involved: there is a regulated sector and there is a regulator. The regulator is government. The regulated sector is the federally regulated railways.

There is a legitimate difference of view between the Liberal Party and the NDP. I admit it freely. We believe there is a role in the private sector to assume a certain amount of responsibility to achieve the highest level of safety possible. We believe, concomitantly, that there is a role for the regulator to ensure that regulated sector is in fact operating at the highest levels.

The NDP does not subscribe to this view. It believes, wrongly, in my view, that it should be hammering the private sector to a point where I think it would have a great bearing on its ability to operate and to remain competitive.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as a regular train passenger, one becomes acquainted with what is on the freight, because freight takes precedence over passenger rail in this country. I tried to make a trip across Canada this past summer, only to find that the volume of fossil fuel travelling by freight delayed passenger rail by as much as six to seven hours a ride with different stations. It is a real shame because VIA Rail is an important part of our economy and we should be treating it a lot better.

In the bill we had a chance to put in something that is in the U.S. rail safety improvement act, which is called “positive train control”. It is the use of high-tech computer monitoring. We would be able to, through positive train control, if we installed it on trains, know if they were going too fast. We would know if their gears were not working. We would know if the brakes had come unhinged. There would be alarm bells ringing. Of course, we also have dangerously slashed the working crews on board freight. However, positive train control would give us much safer railways. I would ask my friend for his comments on this.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my good friend is correct. This is an obvious omission, not necessarily in this bill, but it was an obvious omission in the government's dribs-and-drabs response to the rail safety challenges we are facing.

I would say that she is actually right, as well, when it comes to the question of an adult conversation about the use of our tracks, who gets precedence, who does not get precedence, in terms of use of those railway tracks. Is it passengers? Is it merchandise? Is it goods?

In fact, I commend one of my colleagues from the NDP from Gaspé who brought a bill that at least is beginning the debate about what role VIA Rail should be playing, what role passengers should have versus merchandise and other goods being transported. That is an intelligent debate to have.

Unfortunately, we are not having that under the leadership of the government. It did not want to open it up and do the right thing. We are not talking about improving the system for five years or by the next election. We really should be talking about improving the system for the next century.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member commented about dribs and drabs. There is something to be said for incrementalism. Incremental improvements are better than no improvements. My colleague on the opposite side, with the NDP, pointed out that there were certain things that government did not do over 13 long years. We are actually achieving some success with some of these regulatory changes.

The focus of this bill is liability and compensation. I know the member wanted to take us down the primrose path. He was talking about food safety and other unrelated items. However, let us talk about compensation and liability in the railroad industry, specifically for the smaller railroads that might not have enough insurance. That is important, so let us focus on that. Can the member admit that these are good, positive changes, and will he support that aspect of the bill?

Last week the Minister of Transport was in Washington and announced with Secretary Foxx important changes to the tank car standards, important changes that are achievable and realistic and that will bring about safety, because of the enormous increase in volume with respect to petrochemicals and petroleum products across the border.

Can the member comment on those two things we are doing to address rail safety?

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I never said that this bill should be thrown out in its entirety. I have an obligation to point out for Canadians where its shortcomings are. There are some elements of this bill that are very positive indeed and that we support. In fact, we can take some credit collectively. That is how we work here, collectively, particularly at committee. There are some elements of the bill that are very strong.

However, it is important to remind Canadians that there are other shortfalls, and the chief one for us is the undeniable fact that the government is not properly resourcing its own department. The government cannot ask simply for liability to be increased on the railways if it is not doing its job with its regulatory responsibilities through inspections and audits. The government cannot do that. The system will collapse.

With respect to the minister being in Washington last week, I do not know why she went. She re-announced something from a year ago. It is going to be a 10-year phase-out for most of these cars. It is too bad she made the first announcement on the DOT-111 phase-out. Had she not done that and had she listened to the experts who actually manufacture these cars, we could have saved a considerable amount of time and made a quantum leap to the new cars that can be manufactured right now in the United States, and soon in Canada.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, our rail-line industry is of critical importance. Winnipeg is one of the hub centres with massive CP and CN yards. A phenomenal amount of cargo of all natures goes through it.

This is one of the driving forces of our economy, and that is one reason it is important that when we bring in legislation, we get it right. Given the importance to the economy of getting it right, could the member provide some thoughts on how he sees legislation or regulation in the future playing a critical role in ensuring that our rail lines are safe, and as much as possible, efficient and worthy of travel?

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is easy. If they are prepared to exercise national leadership, and they are prepared to pull together all the parties that are involved that have a stake in improving the system, they can make some progress, and very quickly. It is not easy to actually convene them and find a way forward and get agreement, but it is easy to start the process. That did not happen here. They missed this opportunity.

We have to examine a few things.

Number one, the railway system in this country is as foundational as our electrical grid. We need it. We rely on it to move our goods. It is very much involved in success in wealth creation and particularly jobs in Canada.

Second, we have to have an adult conversation about the use of railways and our energy future. If the oil sands continue to expand the way they are, and we will see, based on oil prices, we will have a million barrels a day of excess capacity in nine years. That is if all the contemplated pipelines are built. There is going to be dramatic pressure on our railways to carry more oil. How are we going to deal with this? What are the consequences? What are the risks? The government does not want to have that conversation.

Those are the kinds of elements we should be bringing together to make sure, as we project outwards, which is our obligation here, that we get a better system that is safer and in which Canadians have more confidence.

Last, if the member thinks there is a disconnect between the water approach in Ontario and what has been happening here, he should go back and read Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's report on Walkerton. He will see very familiar language.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am truly honoured to rise in this place today to speak to this very important piece of legislation. I represent the great riding of Wetaskiwin, which has major rail lines in it, both CP and CN. Constituents in that large rural riding know the value railways have, and I take very seriously the importance of the safety of the operation of the railways in that riding.

Before I go on, I would like to advise that I will be sharing my time with the dapperly dressed member for Elgin—Middlesex—London, who will, I am sure, enlighten the chamber with his thoughts as well.

I rise today to speak in support of Bill C-52. It is a good bill. It is the safe and accountable rail act, which would reinforce the government's polluter pays principle for the rail sector.

The polluter pays principle holds industry accountable to Canadians and supports responsible resource development. It also reflects Canadians' expectations about making responsible parties pay the costs of the accidents they are responsible for.

The polluter pays principle is a key part of the modernization of the liability and compensation regime in other sectors, including the marine sector, the nuclear sector, pipelines, and offshore oil and gas. A number of those bills have already been brought before the House, where we have made exactly the same kinds of legislative changes when it comes to the polluter pays principle in dealing with absolute liability and so on.

In voting for this bill, parliamentarians will be supporting this important principle. This is our government's objective: to ensure that sufficient funds are available to compensate victims of railway accidents and to pay for cleanup costs in the event that those things may happen.

The polluter pays principle means, first, that railways pay the cost of accidents for which they are responsible. Therefore, we are proposing that each railway be required to hold a minimum amount of third-party liability insurance to cover the cost of an accident. This is a good thing. This would give a level of assurance to Canadians that their tax dollars would not be used when it comes to an accident, cleanup, or spill or any of the other damages that might be associated with a minimum level of liability. These minimum insurance levels would be established in the legislation so that they were clear and transparent and so that Canadians would know what they could expect.

With this approach, Canadians would be reassured in the wake of something like the Lac-Mégantic tragedy that railways would have enough insurance to cover these costs when accidents, unfortunately, may happen in the future.

These insurance levels are based on risk. It is an insurance program, and it will be based on risk, as any other real insurance program is. They were developed based on an analysis of rail accident cost data and the potential severity of incidents involving certain types of dangerous goods. The levels range from $25 million to $1 billion, based on the type and volume of dangerous goods the railway may carry. When the new regime comes into force one year after the bill's royal assent, railways that carry little or no dangerous goods will be required to carry $25 million minimum in insurance.

Requirements for railways carrying higher amounts of specified dangerous goods, including crude oil, would be phased in over time. Initially, the railways would be required to carry either $50 million or $125 million of insurance coverage. One year later, those requirements would increase to $100 million or $250 million of coverage.

Railways moving substantial amounts of specified dangerous goods, such as our major national railways, CN and CP, would be required to carry a minimum of $1 billion in liability insurance.

We have heard that some short lines may have difficulty adjusting to the enhanced insurance requirements or that the increased costs may affect their viability. However, as the Lac-Mégantic incident has shown us, accidents involving smaller railways carrying dangerous goods can result in catastrophic damages. It is for this reason that the government committed to hold railways more accountable through enhanced insurance requirements.

Phasing in the highest levels of insurance for short lines at $100 million and $250 million would help mitigate concerns and provide the railways required to hold these amounts with sufficient time to adjust. We do not expect that railways required to hold either $25 million or $1 billion in insurance would need additional time to adjust, so those levels would take effect immediately after the legislation comes into force. This is only fair.

Railways would have to notify the Canadian Transportation Agency of any changes affecting their insurance coverage. The agency could make inquiries to ensure compliance, and the insurance requirements would be enforceable through penalties of up to $100,000 per violation. These measures would ensure that railways were properly insured for their operations.

Another important component of the bill is the polluter pays principle and its clearly established liability in this legislation for railways.

Under the bill, railways would be liable up to their minimum insurance level, without the need to prove fault or negligence—and I have to stress that, without the need to prove fault or negligence—for a railway accident involving crude oil or any other designated good.

As our 2013 Speech from the Throne commitment implied, the railway is not the only responsible party in a railway accident that involves goods such as crude oil. Our government committed to requiring both shippers and railways to carry additional insurance, so that they are also held accountable.

Shippers of dangerous goods like crude oil are a part of the polluter pays concept for the railway sector. This is because such goods have inherent characteristics that contribute to the severity of an accident.

Accordingly, the bill would provide for a mechanism to share liability for accidents more broadly between shippers of crude oil and railways. This would be done through a shipper-financed fund that would supplement a railway's insurance if and when necessary. The fund would be triggered once the cost of a crude oil-related railway accident exceeds a railway's insurance level.

The fund, combined with the insurance levels, would protect potential victims and pay for environmental cleanup and restoration. It would also reimburse governments for the cost of responding to a railway accident.

This two-tiered approach—the insurance and then the fund for any accidents that go over the insured amount—would provide a broad range of coverage for damages in the case of a crude oil railway accident. Higher insurance levels would ensure that railways have more resources available to pay for their liabilities. For accidents involving crude oil, the fund would insure that all other damages and losses were compensated.

This regime would equally cover all actual loss or damage incurred, including damage to people, property, and the environment. The costs incurred in responding to the accident might also be claimed. In addition, the federal or provincial Crown may seek compensation for the impairment of non-use value of public resources.

We are focusing on crude oil because this is a dangerous product that is moved in large quantities by rail over long distances and is a particular concern for Canadians following the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. However, recognizing that other goods have characteristics that could also contribute to the severity of an accident, we have provided the option of adding other goods to the fund in the future by regulation.

Shippers of crude oil would contribute to the fund through a levy of $1.65 per tonne shipped. This levy would apply to any shipment of crude oil carried by a federally regulated railway including a shipment originating from the United States or on a provincially regulated short line.

Capitalizing the fund to $250 million initially would provide substantial additional coverage for crude oil accidents, but this is a notional amount and certainly not a cap on the fund. The bill would allow the minister to discontinue and reimpose a levy as necessary.

Based on a reasonable projection of oil-by-rail traffic growth in the coming years, we determined that a $1.65 per tonne levy on rail shipments of crude oil would likely generate $250 million for the fund in approximately five years. However, the bill provides flexibility for the levy to continue longer than five years should oil-by-rail traffic grow at lower than expected rates.

It is important to emphasis that. Regardless of the capitalization target, the fund would cover all rail accident costs above railway insurance. In the unlikely event that damages exceed the amount being held in the fund, the consolidated revenue fund would provide a loan to cover the shortfall and pay the remaining claims. Any loans from the consolidated revenue fund would be recouped from the industry through levies. These measures are also to reinforce the polluter pays principle.

As I conclude, I want to urge all members to think carefully about how they are going to vote on this piece of legislation. Canadians are counting on us to make a good decision on their behalf.

As we have seen, the accidents have happened in Lac-Mégantic and in my riding of Wetaskiwin, where there are so many communities right on the CP and CN lines. We start out in places like Millet and Wetaskiwin and go down through the Maskwacis area, through Ponoka, Lacombe, and Blackfalds, through Red Deer, and so on; and the CN line goes out in the eastern part through communities like Mirror, Gwynne, and so on. These are communities that are near railway crossings.

The railway traffic in Alberta has increased tremendously over the last number of years with the expansion of oil sands projects and the inability of some pipeline companies to get their projects approved. We have seen an increased dependency on rail for the movement of these items, so it is very important to reassure my constituents, and reassure not only Albertans but any people who have a rail line going through their community, that there will be the coverage available and it will not be at taxpayers' expense as it was with the absence of this legislation, unfortunately, as we saw at Lac-Mégantic.

This is very important legislation, and I encourage all colleagues to vote for it. While they may have criticisms of the bill, or they may want to play politics with this bill, in essence, it would be a sad commentary if we could not come to an agreement in the House that the bill, while it would never be perfect for 308 members, certainly is good enough to be passed into law before we rise for the summer.

[Tarik Brahmi, NDP, Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the remarks of the member across the way.

In the current context of deregulating rail transportation, the number of inspectors is not the only parameter to consider. Indeed, many of the inspection tasks are not done by Transport Canada inspectors, but by the railway employees.

Let us talk about Lac-Mégantic. When the shameful company Montreal, Maine & Atlantic was found at fault, the first thing that happened was that the employees in charge of inspecting the level crossings in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, for example, were laid off. All that safety work came to an abrupt halt because those employees were no longer employed by the railway.

Even though we agree on this bill and on creating this fund, we wonder how this will resolve the problems associated with self-regulation and the fact that the safety guidelines are written by the railway companies and not by the inspectors.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if the hon. member was making the case for nationalizing the railways or not, but that certainly would not be the position of the Conservative government.

The member talked about an unfortunate accident, but what he does not understand is that, in that particular case, because the company did not have insurance, it was immediately on the hook and had to lay off its inspection staff and other staff accordingly.

The bill has several clauses in it that would require companies to share the information with Transport Canada in a timely and effective manner. However, had the bill been in place, a company like MMA would have had the insurance it needed to pay the damages and would not have gone through nearly the financial suffering it did, because it would have also had the fund on top of that. Now, that would not have prevented the accident from happening, but it would have prevented the incident the member is talking about, which would have allowed MMA to stay out of the financial trouble that it would have been in because it would have had insurance coverage that would have carried it through the duration of that particular disaster.

While the hon. member has a good point, his logic that got him to the point where is asking the question just does not hold water.

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I have been an MP for four years. I have often seen how the Conservatives operate and the occasional collusion of the Liberals. These two parties like to join forces on certain issues. A recent example I have in mind is the anti-terrorist bill, which unfortunately passed at third reading here in the House. The Liberals and the Conservatives are also complicit in matters of deregulation, as my colleague from Saint-Jean pointed out.

In 1999, the Liberals went ahead with implementing complete deregulation and allowing self-regulation. Furthermore, it has taken 20 long years, under Liberal and Conservative governments, for the Transportation Safety Board to sound the alarm about the DOT-111 tank cars. In the end, those 20 years of neglect make for a truly pathetic track record.

Although the bill is not without merit, and we support it because it does take some preliminary steps to improve the situation, it does not address the problems of inspection and prevention. Furthermore, it removes the issue of fatigue management, which is an urgent and central problem.

What justification is there for eliminating fatigue management from the Railway Safety Act?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member finally got to his question dealing with fatigue. I got a little fatigued listening to him finally get to that particular point, but in all fairness, the question is a very serious one.

Anybody who drives a truck or flies on an airplane knows that pilots are subject to the rules about how long they can fly and truckers keep log books about how long they can be on the road.

The member would know that the proposed amendments in the bill would change the regulation-making power for safety management systems to add in the concept of employee fatigue management. Therefore, that is captured in the essence of this bill. The result would be that railway companies would be required to take into consideration the management of their employees' fatigue and include scheduling in their safety management system.

We are making progress on that, which is why all members of this House should support this bill.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the safe and accountable rail act.

Following the tragic July 2013 accident at Lac-Mégantic, our government acted quickly to strengthen safety in Canada's rail and transport of dangerous goods systems. Our actions have been based on three fundamental elements of rail safety, which are prevention, preparedness and response, and liability and compensation. This bill relates to the third of those pillars, liability and compensation. Today, I would like to outline how this proposed legislation would strengthen our liability and compensation regime for federally regulated railways.

The events of Lac-Mégantic highlighted the importance of having a strong liability and compensation regime for rail, and adequate compensation available in the event of a major accident. In the 2013 Speech from the Throne, we committed to hold railways and shippers accountable. To act on this and to examine how to strengthen our regime, we undertook a comprehensive review, which included two rounds of extensive consultations with a wide range of stakeholders, including railways, shippers, provinces, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the insurance industry.

Our objective has been to ensure there are sufficient resources to adequately compensate potential victims and pay for cleanup costs. Our aim is also to make sure that the polluters pay, so that the taxpayers do not shoulder the financial burden in the event of an accident. These key principles are also central to the liability and compensation regimes that are currently being updated in other modes and sectors, such as offshore oil and gas, marine tankers, and pipelines. This proposed legislation would achieve these goals by sharing liability for rail accidents between railways and the shippers of crude oil, clarifying liability to benefit claimants, making more resources available for compensation, and ensuring compliance with the new regime.

What we are proposing is a two-tier system similar to the approach taken for marine oil tankers. The first tier would enhance insurance for federally regulated railways by imposing risk-based mandatory minimum insurance requirements. The second tier would share accountability for rail accidents with shippers of certain dangerous goods through a supplementary compensation fund.

Let me get into some of the specifics of the first tier, enhanced railway insurance. The responsibility for railway accidents rests first with the railway. The bill would establish minimum mandatory insurance levels that are explicitly linked to risk. The Canadian Transportation Agency would assign railways to a minimum insurance level based on the type and volume of the specific dangerous goods they carry. The minimum mandatory insurance requirements take into account the potential severity of accidents. The requirements range from $25 million for railways that carry few or no dangerous goods to $1 billion for railways that transport significant volumes of dangerous goods. Insurance would cover the damages involving third party injury or loss of life, third party property damage, and the risk associated with a leak, pollution, or contamination.

The bill would also clarify the railway's liability for accidents involving crude oil. Railways would automatically be liable up to their insurance limit without having to prove fault or negligence, and the railways would have to be operationally or physically involved in the accident in order to be held liable. This would give potential victims more certainty regarding their compensation claims, and it would protect taxpayers from having to cover the excess liability that we know can result from a catastrophic accident. For other accidents, liability would continue to be established through the courts, based on fault or negligence, as it is today.

I will turn to the second tier of the proposed new regime, which is the shipper-financed compensation fund. As I mentioned earlier, railway companies, through their insurance, would be the payers of the first resort for rail accidents. However, for accidents involving crude oil, any damages above the railway's liability limit would be covered by the fund. This fund would be financed by shippers through a levy of $1.65 per tonne of crude oil carried by the federally regulated railway and deposited into a special account of the consolidated revenue fund.

Our focus on crude oil for the fund responds first and foremost to the concerns that were expressed in relation to the Lac-Mégantic incident. Clearly, Canadians are concerned about the growing volumes of oil being transported by rail across long distances and through many communities, a trend that is expected to continue. Our approach recognizes that this is a new and significant phenomenon and we need to have adequate measures in place to hold the industry accountable. However, in the future some other dangerous goods could be scoped into the fund through regulation.

The combination of the enhanced insurance requirements and the supplementary fund would provide sufficient resources to cover the vast majority of potential accidents. The fund would be the payer of last resort in the rare event of damages from a rail accident involving crude oil surpassing the railway's insurance level. Furthermore, should an accident be of such a magnitude to deplete the resources held in the compensation fund, the consolidated revenue fund would be called upon to act as a backstop. This would ensure that all damages resulting from a rail accident involving crude oil would be covered.

It is important to emphasize that even in such an extreme situation the taxpayer should be protected. Any public money loaned to the compensation fund would be repayable with interest on terms set by the Minister of Finance through levies on the industry.

Another important part of establishing this compensation fund is putting in place an administrative body that can manage the fund effectively and in a cost efficient manner. To that end, we are modelling the fund's administration on that of the ship source oil pollution fund in the regime of marine tankers. A fund administrator would be responsible for establishing and paying out claims after the railway's liability limit was reached. As well as reporting on the management of the fund to Parliament through the minister of transport, after paying out claims, the fund administrator would be able to seek reimbursement from any at fault third parties through the courts.

The fund would achieve two important goals. First, it would ensure that shippers are held accountable for the liabilities associated with transporting their dangerous goods. This reflects the fact that shippers are a part of the polluter pays equation and that the nature of their products contribute to transportation risk. Second, the fund would provide added resources that could be called upon to compensate for damages, if required.

The benefits of this two-tiered regime that I have just described would only be felt if it operates as designed. That is why we have included enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance. To ensure railways comply with the enhanced insurance requirements and collect and remit levies for the fund, monetary penalties of up to $100,000 per violation could be applied. Penalties would not be applied to shippers. Instead, to ensure that levies were paid, a railway's common carrier obligations to the shipper would be conditional on the shipper paying the required levy to the railway. In other words, the goods would not be shipped without payment of the levy.

A robust liability and compensation regime for rail complements our government's actions to further strengthen the safety of our rail system and the transportation of dangerous goods. Putting this legislation in place would ensure that should other rail accidents occur polluters would be held accountable and would provide the resources needed to compensate victims and to clean up the environment. I therefore urge all members to adopt the bill.

I come from an area of the country in southern Ontario, from a community that has been known as the railway capital of Canada. At different times, 36 different railways have run through St. Thomas, Ontario. It is quite proud of its railways heritage and its railway safety. As far as I know, we only had the one significant accident. In 1886, Jumbo the elephant was hit by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario. The largest elephant known to man, P.T. Barnum lost one of his greatest assets. I believe he would have wished this type of insurance plan was in place to have compensated him when Jumbo the elephant went down that day to the train in St. Thomas, Ontario.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for La Francophonie]

Mr. Speaker, there is some important insight to be gleaned from the member's comments.

First, I commend him for focusing on the actual content of the bill. It is an important one, focused very squarely on the compensation and liability regime for railroads. It is not a panacea.

Railroads have been operating for well over a century in North America and in Canada. They will continue to operate and be a real cornerstone of our economy, our vibrant continental and international economy.

Could my colleague expand on the compensation fund? I think we all understand insurance and how that works, and the need for companies, where there are risks, to have adequate insurance. Certainly in the case of Lac-Mégantic, that railroad, the MMA, did not have adequate insurance to ensure that the victims were properly compensated.

On the compensation fund, the notion is that the railways are responsible for the risks, but the shippers are responsible for the risk as well. Could the member comment on that? How will the shippers take some responsible for the risk? At the same time, will this compensation fund affect their competitiveness? We understand how important it is to the petroleum industry in our country. It pays for all kinds of things that we appreciate in our great country.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have put in place what we think is belt and suspenders, in the way of being able to compensate. The railways are asked to carry a level of insurance based on the types of products they carry and the amount of business they do.

The second phase of that is a compensation fund that is available for the much larger accidents that would not be covered by insurance or might not be able to be covered by insurance, even though we have ensured that the railways carry that insurance.

The fund is created by $1.65 per tonne of oil, in this case oil carried. It is paid as the shipping happens so the fund is robust, is always complete, and it has money there. Over time, it will be able to handle any sort of accident that may happen, although we hope the fund is never used. All Canadians would hope that is the case.

As we continue to move dangerous products, like oil, by train, there is the opportunity that it might happen. Beyond the insurance of the companies involved, this will create a greater fund for those much larger and perhaps more dangerous situations.

[Raymond Côté, NDP, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

The Canadian disaster relief fund is an interesting aspect of the bill, but it does raise some concerns.

First, we do not understand why the amount was set at $250 million. Second, the money for this fund will be in the general revenues of the government.

I studied the budget extensively and I am in the process of going over the budget implementation bill, and I cannot say that the government inspires confidence. For example, to balance the budget this year, the Conservatives raided the national contingency fund.

I would like my colleague to clarify all this. I am not sure he will be able to reassure the public.

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be more than able to reassure. I will be able to reassure the member opposite that constituents in my riding and across Canada have been putting their faith in this government and agree that a promise made is a promise kept.

In the sense of balancing a budget, and I thank the member for bringing that up. Back home that is a pretty significant piece. I thank the member for allowing me to advertise that a little here.

The legislation we are debating today is also a promise made. When the members opposite vote for it at the end of this level of debate, it will be another promise kept. We then can tell Canadians that rail safety matters, that rail safety is taken care of, that railways will be asked to carry a level of insurance. We will also be able to put together the consolidated fund for those larger incidents that may or may not happen.

I thank the member for pointing out the great work of this government in its budgeting, and balancing of it. I thank him for allowing me to talk a little more about it today.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Before resuming debate, I must inform the hon. member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine that there are 17 minutes remaining for government orders. The hon. member would normally have 20 minutes for his speech, but I will interrupt him at 5:30 p.m., at the end of the time provided for government orders.

[Philip Toone, NDP, Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will try to be brief. Today, we are debating a bill that will supposedly improve rail safety in Canada. One of the government's main responsibilities is definitely to ensure public safety.

There has been a spectacular increase in the amount of oil shipped by rail. In 2009 there were 6,000 cars transporting oil, whereas last year, in 2014, there were 110,000. Canadians certainly have the right to ask questions, especially whether their safety is really this government's priority. The Lac-Mégantic disaster showed that there are serious flaws when it comes to safety.

Today, we have before us a bill that will not improve rail safety, but will instead address the issue of insurance after an accident. This is a reactive rather than a proactive bill.

We do not improve the safety of Canadians by sending a cheque after an accident occurs. We must improve the public's safety. The quality of Canada's rail system is very questionable, primarily because of the bills passed by successive governments in the past 20 years. That is what I am going to talk about.

I welcome the opportunity to address the government's bill, Bill C-52, the so-called safe and accountable rail act, which is a revised version of the existing Canada Transportation Act.

The biggest problem I have with the legislation is that it is based on an act that was inadequate when it was passed in 1996 by a Liberal government, and in turn, that bill was based on an even worse act passed by the Conservatives in 1987.

What we are being asked to do now, frankly, is comparable to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We have a fundamental responsibility to ensure safety, not to spend hours discussing insurance liability for rail companies. That is certainly a first step, and it is why I am going to support the legislation, but it is a tiny step. We need to go an awful lot further.

The changes proposed today are only the beginning of an answer. Canadians need a new act that is based on fundamental elements that have been lacking all along. From the very start, the current act has lacked the basics necessary to maximize the performance and safety of our multi-modal transportation system and especially its rail component.

The maintenance and safe, effective operation of a national transportation system fully addressing the needs of this country, the private owners of the majority of that system, and the shippers and passengers who depend on it requires that it be conceived as a whole. The essential elements would be policy, legislation, planning, and adequate funding, which the government sorely lacks in many fields of its jurisdiction.

Legislation is but one element in the development of a comprehensive and effective national transportation system. However, the Canada Transportation Act lacks many of these building blocks, the most elementary being a basic national policy balancing public and private interests.

As is said in the introduction to this legislation's review discussion paper, Canada's transportation system is “substantially more market-based, deregulated and competitive” than it was in the period before the Mulroney Conservatives introduced their deregulatory act in 1987.

In fact, our transportation system today is largely based on a laissez-faire approach that reserves only a few areas for public oversight. Its most vital flaw is the lack of an underlying, proactive policy.

As a result, Canada's transportation system is a series of silos that have been cobbled together by multiple and often competing owners without a comprehensive plan. All of them have wound up being patched up with this makeshift legislative and financial band-aid to correct the flaws created by a boundless faith in this hands-off, strictly-for-profit approach. It is totally unrealistic.

The VIA Rail Canada program, funding for remote airports and roads, scattershot safety fixes, a last minute renewal of federal funding for the Algoma Central passenger service and the government's Fair Rail for Grain Farmers Act, these form a patchwork of intervention in a system that the government likes to think does not require intervention, yet it continues to intervene.

There is no central policy or plan at work here, and it has been said that this type of necessary intervention is too frequently only taken by governments such as this in the run-up to an election. Pardon the pun, but this is no way to run a railroad. It is certainly no way to run a country.

The Canadian approach is far different from that taken by other countries that view transportation not just as a business, but as a potent tool for national, economic, social and environmental growth and security. This especially applies to the rail sector.

The United States took a similar laissez-faire approach to railroading for decades. With the construction of its highway interstate network, the national rail system there drifted along without benefit of a clear policy, nor comprehensive planning, nor balanced or sustainable funding, very similar to Canada today. The result was the collapse of large parts of the system and the need for government intervention under crisis conditions.

The revision of the U.S. approach to railroading is now under way with the enunciation of clear, inclusive policies that are interlocked with legislation, planning and funding to realize this new national vision. The objective is to maximize the potential of rail in concert, not in competition, with the other modes.

Making changes to the limited amount of legislation embodied in this CTA is only a small part of the solution. Without a clear and comprehensive national policy, even the best legislation will fail because it is based on what amounts to an absence of policy. Revising the CTA in the absence of enlightened and proactive policies cannot and will not decisively correct its major deficiencies.

There are two specific areas that concern me greatly. The first is the safety of the transportation network that has evolved under the current CTA and the predecessor deregulatory act on which it is based. This especially applies to rail.

We have now gone through a wave of rail accidents that have demonstrated how much our system has declined. If this was only to include Lac-Mégantic, that would already be much too much, but we have experienced numerous major derailments, both before and after that disaster, that have demonstrated that our rail system is degrading, and degrading rapidly.

Just as bad, it is not being monitored adequately on behalf of the public. What we have now is a self-regulating rail safety network, and it is not working.

Our rail safety regime under the CTA is badly flawed. It provides inadequate protection for individuals, inadequate protection for communities and its workers. In the pursuit of profits, corners are being cut and this inadequate attention to safety is not being revealed until it is too late. What we have now is reactive rail safety legislation.

To be effective, there must be a new safety legislation within the CTA that is not only better, it must be vigilantly enforced. Any new legislation must recognize that the public interest can only be adequately protected when the regulator has the power and the resources to enforce the rules.

Some believe that compelling the railways to carry more insurance is the answer. This is the very basis of this current legislation. While it is part of the solution, this is reactive in nature and after the fact. It does not prevent accidents; it merely analyzes them after they have occurred.

Funds should also be invested in improved infrastructure and safety appliances, which would prevent fiery derailments that pose an unnecessary risk to public safety. I am extremely disappointed that the bill does not include the implementation of a safety system that would have a major impact on Canadian rail safety. PTC, positive train control, a highly effective high-tech system, has been mandated by the U.S. Congress for all main lines handling passenger trains and freight trains carrying dangerous goods.

PTC would have had substantial impact on the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. In fact, it could have prevented it by alerting employees of the impending catastrophe as soon as that train began to be under way. There could have been intervention at a critical time. At the very least, the PTC system would have allowed for the minimization of the eventual derailment that led to the devastating explosions and the horrible loss of life. This bill does not even contemplate the application or the requirement for advanced technologies such as PTC.

I would also point out that the requirement to safely equip and maintain operations with advanced systems such as PTC would generate a domestic economic uplift. It would stimulate Canadian railway supply industries and creates jobs, such as in La Pocatière, Quebec and in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Private railway funding of large insurance policies usually just goes to offshore insurance companies and does nothing really to improve safety.

Furthermore, legislation aimed at improving rail safety must recognize that it requires on-the-ground inspection by trained government personnel who have the power to rigidly enforce the rules. There must be an adequate number of them to do it on a constant and daily basis.

I also believe that CTA needs to be revised to play a major role in proper functioning of our passenger rail service, VIA Rail Canada. There is precious little in the act today aimed at establishing the mandate, rights or obligations of our national passenger service, or even other passenger or commuter operations. I attempted to correct this situation with Bill C-640, An Act respecting VIA Rail Canada and making consequential amendments to the Canada Transportation Act, which would have required consequential amendments to the current CTA. That overdue legislation was defeated by the current Conservative government.

There is little in the current act to protect and direct the provision of a proper rail passenger system. There is, in fact, only one clause in the current CTA that affords any legislative rights in delivering a necessary service to millions of Canadians. When it has been applied on a very few occasions, it has been helpful but it does not go far enough in establishing VIA's right to operate on the lines of the privately owned freight railways.

VIA, like the whole transportation system, will never function effectively as long as our national transportation system is based on legislation that does not allow for the protection of the public interest. Nor does it respect the fair rights of our for-profit freight railways. These two are not mutually exclusive. A strong and healthy transportation system is vital to improve Canada's global competitiveness, security, social well-being and environmental performance. We won't have that as long as we allow our multi-modal system to function in what amounts to a policy vacuum. That is what we have today under the CTA, and no amount of tinkering is going to correct it.

As other nations with which we compete have demonstrated, the federal government needs to become much more engaged, innovative and supportive in addressing the numerous challenges that stand in the way of delivering safe, modern, adequate and sustainable transportation services across our land. To be truly effective, the CTA needs to be revised on the basis of a comprehensive national transportation policy that takes into account the needs of all stakeholders, public and private. This is a matter well beyond any revision of the act, solely presented here before the hon. members. It must originate at the highest levels of our federal government and it must include a serious dialogue.

The current bill was presented to a parliamentary committee in two sittings. This very important piece of legislation was rammed through much too quickly. Many stakeholders did not have the opportunity to speak. We need to take all of the steps necessary. This bill is simply a first step.

Let us remember that when the minister recently, with her American colleagues, announced new regulations regarding the transportation of dangerous goods, the minister and her American counterpart said that from now on, in urban areas of 100,000 people or more, the speed limit for dangerous goods will be 40 miles an hour. The problem with that is that it is not the density of the population nearby that is the real problem; it is the quality of the railway itself.

There are many areas of this country where we have allowed companies not to complete sufficient rail maintenance. They have deferred it to future periods, and when the rail cars run on these inadequately maintained rails, there is risk of accident. The government then has to act in a crisis situation, such as it did in northern New Brunswick, where it had to negotiate under the gun with a rail company to ensure that the railway was going to be properly maintained over the next 15 years.

This should not be managed in a crisis mode. We know the problem is the quality of the rail itself. We know that private companies are self-monitoring. Without proper supervision by the government and its agencies, this problem is simply going to be compounded. Again, the amount of rail transportation of our oil products is skyrocketing, and the danger to the public goes up at the same rate.

We have to take our responsibilities seriously. The government has taken only a very small step in that direction with this legislation. We need to do an awful lot more to prove to the Canadian public that we are taking our job seriously.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

There will be three and a half minutes remaining for the hon. member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine when the House next resumes debate on the question, as well as the normal 10 minutes for questions and comments.

It being 5:30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' business as listed on today's order paper.

The House resumed from May 7 consideration of the motion that Bill C-52, An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act, be read the third time and passed.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I just wanted to double-check because I believe there was still some time on the clock for the hon. member for Gaspésie—Îles-de-la-Madeleine. I thought I saw him here a moment ago, but if that is not the case, I am more than prepared to proceed.

I rise to speak today on a bill that is important and has my support, but it opens up an area of public policy that really bears fuller examination. This bill gives us a chance to discuss that. I speak of Bill C-52, a bill for rail safety. As we all know, the issues of rail safety have become increasingly of concern to Canadians.

The title of Bill C-52 is the safe and accountable rail act, but I think it needs to be acknowledged that, while the bill is certainly welcome and is a step in the right direction, it actually only speaks to the accountability side of safe and accountable. It speaks to what we do in the event of accidents, such as who is responsible, how much insurance they must carry, and who can sue after the fact under the polluter pays principle. It does provide a number of important improvements, particularly for municipalities and others affected by rail accidents. It does create a minimum insurance requirement of $1 billion. These things are welcome.

However, the issue of rail safety continues to be one of deep concern. So many of the witnesses before committee spoke to the fact that Bill C-52, while welcome, does not go nearly far enough, and the steps that have been taken so far by Transport Canada to improve rail safety in the wake of the disaster at Lac-Mégantic also are moving too slowly and, even if fully implemented, do not go far enough.

I would like to take a moment to point out that, if we look at Lac-Mégantic as an example—and this was an example put forward by witnesses at committee—a $1 billion minimum insurance requirement for class 1 railways is something that was legislated mandate. The class 1 railways have already been carrying it. Certainly we never wanted to see the Lac-Mégantic disaster. May we never again see a disaster of that scale. However, now that we know it is possible, it behooves us to put in place the insurance requirements that would meet a disaster of that scale, which would, according to witnesses, be closer to six times that amount, or $6 billion.

Looking at the issue of rail safety, over the last number of years we have had what I would almost put forward as a perfect storm of changes in the private sector, in government, and in the types of goods we are shipping. They come together in ways that leave us less safe than we have been before, even with the improvements Transport Canada and the minister have made. For instance, as recently as 2009, only 500 cars a year were carrying highly flammable fossil fuels, the flammable crudes that take up most of our discussion these days. We know the number has gone up in the last two years, but in 2013 we were up to 160,000 car loads. This is a phenomenal increase in hazardous goods moving on our rails, and that leaves out other types of hazardous goods, whether chlorine or other hazardous substances.

The Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs took this statistic and converted it into millions of barrels and said that, as of now, we have a million barrels of crude oil, flammable class 3 liquids, per day moving on our rails. It also pointed out that in 2013, the last year for which I have statistics, which I found through the witnesses, there were 144 accidents that involved dangerous goods, 7 of which resulted in dangerous goods being released.

We have seen steps taken. I referred to them briefly before. The transportation safety boards in Canada and the U.S. make findings about safety but do not have the regulatory power to implement them.

The transportation safety boards on both sides of our border found some time ago that the DOT-111 railcars constituted an unsafe way to transport such hazardous and flammable materials.

We have taken some steps, as has the U.S., but there is a long lead time for the implementation, so now we are taking class 1232 trains and retrofitting them for crude oil. That must be done by 2020 and for less flammable materials by 2025. Still, until 2017—so we have 2 more years to go—the unsafe DOT-111 cars will still be rolling through our communities; 80,000 DOT-111 railcars will be still in service in the U.S. and Canada until 2017.

Why did I speak of the trends? We have essentially less safety and more hazardous goods. The rail industry, in theory, whether moving passengers or goods, is one of the safest and most environmentally appropriate way to move people and goods. This needs to be reiterated because it is an essential part of our infrastructure, and one of our arguments as Greens is that it is an essential part of our infrastructure that we have been ignoring too long.

We need to upgrade in the passenger context, and we need to invest in more modern trains and better rail beds. We need to continually upgrade the access to passenger rail and invest in VIA Rail for Canadians from coast to coast—and ultimately to coast, at least insofar as the Hudson Bay train would get there. Coast to coast to coast rail service makes sense, and modernizing it to bring it into the 21st century is an important investment for Canadians. It is an important part of our transportation infrastructure.

In the case of goods travelling by rail compared to by truck, it is safer in terms of accidents on our highways and, in theory, it reduces greenhouse gases. It is by far the safest way to transport hazardous goods. The difficulty we have is what has been happening in practice. Over the last decade or so—certainly not just in recent years—we saw a change through the smart regulatory regime; we have seen a change through private sector pressures to improve productivity; we have seen a change through government cutbacks; and ultimately we have greater risks because of the change in our industry.

Let us look, in terms of reduced safety, at the first point I wanted to make. The freight industry in Canada is private sector, whereas VIA Rail is a Crown corporation. We are now dealing with the pressure of for-profit companies, and one certainly understands their point of view, but as a result of their pressure to improve the profit bottom line, we heard from the rail sector labour force, and particularly from the unionized members and the union in that rail sector, of a continual cutback in engineers and onboard rail crews that has led to greater safety concerns.

We have also seen a failure to pay sufficient attention to maintenance along tracks. A number of the significant derailments that have occurred recently occurred because of failure to keep tracks and bridges operating properly. We even had a fatality because of the failure to keep a railway trestle in proper repair.

Back in 2005, a CN train derailed at Wabamun Lake in Alberta and resulted in a substantial spill, in which CN Rail was ultimately fined $1.4 million, which was a very modest fine, given the scale of that spill. The inquiry into that found that the rails over which that train was travelling were worn out and they had not been kept in adequate repair.

That was certainly a significant event, but there were a number of derailments right after it in 2005. This started creating more concern about the use of rail for freight that extended right across Canada, asking what more we could do and what the Transportation Safety Board was doing to ensure rail safety.

The second piece that made us less safe has been in the government decision to move to safety management systems. It is essentially a form of deregulation that came into effect some time ago.

I direct the House to a finding in a report released in 2007 by the Canada Safety Council. It reported that the system is one that:

...allows rail companies to regulate themselves, removing the federal government's ability to protect Canadians and their environment, and allowing the industry to hide critical safety information from the public.

One would think that having gone to a system such as this, Transport Canada would have a supervisory authority to review these SMSs, or safety management systems, to ensure their adequacy. However, it does not appear that is the case.

The third part of the less safe system is cutbacks at Transport Canada. We now have fewer engineers than we used to have available in Transport Canada to do the work of reviewing rail safety. According to a number of media reports, Transport Canada currently has, and has had since 2009, 30 critical rail safety positions that have remained vacant. These are for engineers who could do such things as anticipate and organize the removal of DOT-111 cars from the tracks. Missing critical people in rail safety and critical people at Transport Canada who deal with hazardous goods is not a good sign to Canadians. We saw budget cuts at Transport Canada in 2012 that seem to now put in stone the fact that these positions are not likely to be filled again.

We have hazardous goods moving through communities, as the committee was reminded by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and citizen groups concerned with hazardous goods rolling through communities, yet we have not filled critical safety positions within Transport Canada.

The third part relies on what is happening in the private sector and why we are seeing more and more freight, and particularly more and more dangerous freight, on our tracks. I am a huge supporter of passenger rail, as members can probably tell by now from my speech. I have travelled Canada's rails, criss-crossing the country as often as I get the chance. Often, I have done it in the context of political campaigns and whistlestop tours, where it really matters to know that we are going to arrive at our destination some time near the scheduled time on the VIA Rail schedule.

As anyone who pays attention to rail in Canada knows, VIA Rail has to rent the tracks from CN and other rail owners. VIA Rail is not in control of the switches or the red, yellow, and green lights. In other words, passenger rail in Canada and on-time arrivals are virtually entirely hostage to freight. When we have increasingly long trains that can no longer pull over onto sidings and VIA Rail passenger rail that is short enough to stay on the sidings, VIA Rail passenger trains often have to wait for hours for the convenience of freight to go by.

We have not given adequate concern or attention as Parliament or Transport Canada's regulators to the length of freight trains and the fact that they are often stacking cars, and then again to the kinds of material that they are shipping. The horrors of Lac-Mégantic woke us up to what they are shipping. I do not think that any of us will ever forget the horror of the morning of July 5, 2013, of the disaster that killed 47 people.

The Transportation Safety Board had already approved what looked like a perfectly satisfactory system of safety on the part of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. It had provided its safety management system to Transport Canada, and it was entirely legal on July 5, 2013, for an engineer to leave an idling train above a community, having set hand brakes with the assumption that the air brakes would not fail. The engineer actually set seven hand brakes when, in fact, the minimum number of hand brakes on the company chart was nine. The Transportation Safety Board has since found that nine hand brakes would not have held the train if the air brakes had failed.

As we know, the disaster of Lac-Mégantic is one of a train barrelling into a community that lay entirely unaware of the disaster that was about to befall it. Not only did the community not know that it was legal and that Transport Canada had approved a system that allowed an idling train to be left unattended with hand brakes on above a community, but no one really knew what kind of flammable and dangerous materials were on board, because it was reported as crude oil.

It was in fact Bakken shale, which is an entirely different chemical composition, and as we know, to our horror, it formed a fireball that destroyed much of that community, killed 47 people, and injured many more.

As we stand here today on May 12, 2015, are we sure that such a disaster as Lac-Mégantic could not happen in another Canadian community? Despite all the safety measures I mentioned, and in the face of Bill C-52, the safe and accountable rail act, we have to say no.

We know a lot more about Bakken shale, and there is a greater requirement that communities be notified if it is moving through the community, but Bakken shale is not the only unconventional oil. If we mix bitumen with diluent, it also becomes far more flammable than bitumen by itself.

I should mention parenthetically, because I think it is of some interest to people, that if bitumen by itself is heated so that it can be put into a railcar without the presence of diluents, it is virtually not a dangerous material at all. It cannot spill and it does not blow up.

However, we have not taken safety measures to ensure that diluent will not be moved by rail. Diluent is the stuff they mix with bitumen. It was diluent, which is toxic and hazardous, that was being shipped to northern Alberta through the city of Calgary in those railcars that were hanging so precipitously over the Bow River during the flooding when the bridge gave way. The municipal workers of Calgary had to thread cables through those railcars to keep them from falling into the river. The material in those railcars was diluent, and it was headed to northern Alberta to be stirred in with solid bitumen so that it would be capable of being shipped, whether by pipe or by rail, without resorting to steam-liquefied bitumen, which can actually be moved into railcars without adding diluent.

A wide range of toxic and and dangerous substances are being moved by rail, and I want to turn to the evidence of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, as presented by Paul Boissonneault, fire chief of County of Brant Fire Department and current president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs. He has pointed out a number of things that we could do to make the situation safer. One would be to divert some funding for firefighter training to assist people in communities and local fire departments to be able to confront threats. Firefighters should never be exposed to something as dreadful as Lac-Mégantic and neither should the community, but we do have a serious gap that the fire chiefs have pointed out in terms of preparation for firefighters.

They are also looking specifically at other hazardous goods. The bill deals with various forms of crude oil and the most flammable and dangerous forms of crude oil, which are not really crude at all, such as Bakken shale or bitumen mixed with diluent. However, the firefighters also point out that the propane and chlorine that move on our rails also need to be brought into the bill for further measures for safety.

We need to have much more information sharing, and the bill makes some good first steps. The bill would allow requirements relating to information sharing between railways and municipalities in response to emergencies, but we do need greater levels of detail in that information, and the communities have a right to know.

We need to do much more in strengthening the Canadian Transport Emergency Centre to be part of current regulatory activities. We need municipalities to be sitting down with Transport Canada and with the shippers to find better and safer ways. There are some that we know about; one is called “positive train control”. It is used in the United States and is in its rail safety act, although it is not fully implemented yet. It constitutes an on-board computerized system that creates very clear advance information and very immediate real-time information about where brakes are weak, where parts of the trains are overheating, whether speed is out of control, and whether there are problems on board. Positive train control is now part of the U.S. rail safety act; it should be part of ours.

We can also take steps to regulate for shorter freight trains. Braking is far more dangerous and difficult when trains are essentially too long to stop.

We have an opportunity to do much more in Canada to create real rail safety. While I will be voting for Bill C-52, I want no Canadian under any illusion that passing the bill will create a safe rail transport system. It will not, and Canadians deserve a real safe rail system in this country.

[Chris Charlton, NDP, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Mr. Speaker, there is absolutely no doubt that protecting the public is a core responsibility of this government—of any government, for that matter—and improving rail liability and accountability measures is long overdue. It is sad that it took the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic to get the government to be serious about that responsibility.

I listened carefully to my colleague's speech. I wonder whether she would comment on a different aspect, one that she did not get to in her speech. It seems to me that one of the things that has become apparent as we have studied the Lac-Mégantic tragedy and others is that the safety of railcars is also something that we need to take very seriously.

I come from Hamilton, where we have lost over 13,000 manufacturing jobs. We all know that under the current Conservative government the country has lost almost 420,000 manufacturing jobs, yet in Hamilton we have a company called National Steel Car, which produces railcars in this country. I know that the company would very much welcome the opportunity to talk to Transport Canada and officials about how to design and build those railcars in Canada.

I wonder whether the member could comment on whether she would support a strategy that would support manufacturing jobs here in Canada, in this case specifically for railcars.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I completely agree with my friend from Hamilton. I am a former resident of Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and it was a tragedy to see railcar manufacturing by TrentonWorks moved to Mexico by its U.S. owner, Greenbrier. It had actually experienced profits every year, but it saw its opportunity for greater profits lay in moving all those jobs in manufacturing railcars to Mexico.

We need to invest in manufacturing in Canada. Given the tremendous shortage of safe railcars, we could turn this around into a business opportunity for Canada. Both Canada and the U.S. are phasing out DOT-111 railcars, which means that there is an enormous market for safer railcars with thicker walls for safer transport of goods. We should be seizing that opportunity and building railcars in Canada for sale in Canada and the United States.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments put on the record from the leader of the Green Party.

I have a question in regard to getting a better understanding of the Green Party's perspective on pipelines.

Many of the issues that the member referred to in her speech deal strictly with the transportation of commodities that could actually be transported through pipelines. As the leader of the Green Party, could she give her thoughts as to what role pipelines might play in that transportation? What are her thoughts on pipelines in general and on how pipelines could impact rail line traffic?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for Winnipeg North for that question, because it is the subject of a lot of public debate and it needs to be addressed.

I know that the pipeline industry tried to seize on Lac-Mégantic as an argument for pipelines in a way that was seen at the time as a bit inappropriate, given the tragedy that had occurred.

Pipelines can transport many goods. If we are talking about refined petroleum products, I do not know of anyone who is opposed to pipelines moving refined goods, because the impact of a spill is relatively minor and we are keeping the jobs in Canada. However, the pipeline projects that are currently the subject of the greatest debate are Keystone, Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, and Energy East, and their common goal to move bitumen as a raw material to tidewater to be shipped to another country for refining.

I mentioned diluent earlier, which is a toxic fossil fuel condensate. Enbridge proposed to buy it from Saudi Arabia, bring it in tankers to Kitimat, put it in a pipeline running from Kitimat to northern Alberta, and then stir it into solid bitumen, because the solid bitumen, being a solid, will not flow. Enbridge would then stir in the diluent that it imported to make a mix called dilbit to put in a pipeline running in the other direction, sending it to a tanker to go somewhere else, maybe China, for refining.

The position of the Green Party is that we do not support any pipeline if the intention is to use it to ship dilbit. It is an extremely dangerous commodity in that when it spills, as the Kalamazoo River spill in Michigan has shown us, it is virtually impossible to clean up. It makes much more sense economically, as it appears new Premier Notley wants to do, to refine product in Alberta rather than try to find dangerous pipelines for risky tankers.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for her speech.

Just this past weekend, a concern was raised in Sherbrooke, which is very close to Lac-Mégantic: we do not know what is in the infamous tanker cars that are behind the locomotives. Municipalities want to know what is in the tanker cars before they travel through cities so that firefighters, as first responders, will know what to do in the event of an accident. That also goes for several other areas, for the sake of prevention and ensuring that emergency plans are in place. One of the concerns of the City of Sherbrooke—and other Canadian cities, I am sure—is finding out what is on those trains in order to better respond in the event of an accident. At present cities do not know what the trains are carrying.

Does my colleague believe that ideally the government should create laws and regulations that require rail carriers to inform cities of what is on the trains so they can provide an appropriate response in the event of an accident?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I absolutely agree with my colleague from Sherbrooke. I feel that cities must have the right to be informed in an emergency situation.

I would like to add something else. It is important to point out, given that there has been no inquiry into this disaster, that in a report, Bruce Campbell says:

The worst rail disaster in modern Canadian history warrants nothing less than an independent judicial commission of inquiry.

I believe that municipalities' questions would be an important aspect of this type of inquiry.

[Ève Péclet, NDP, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my question is fairly straightforward.

For the past 10 years, we have seen a drastic increase in the transportation of dangerous goods by rail. Since the tragic Lac-Mégantic derailment, the government has hired one or maybe two new inspectors. Since the regulations do not set a limit on the number of cars, sometimes one inspector has to inspect thousands of cars. I looked at the 2015-16 budget and I did not find anything at all in there about rail safety.

I would like my colleague to tell me why the budget makes no mention of rail safety.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to sincerely thank my colleague for giving me the opportunity to emphasize this point.

As I already said, cuts are being made at Transport Canada. My colleague is absolutely right: there is nothing in the 2015-16 budget to help Transport Canada increase and improve its capacity regarding rail safety. There is nothing there. Since the 2012 budget cuts, the Department of Transport has not had sufficient resources to ensure rail safety. What is more, past reports of the Commissioner of the Environment and the Auditor General point out that there is no safety regime applicable to any part of our rail system. I would like to reiterate that this budget does not provide the resources necessary to improve rail safety.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as always, it is a great honour to rise in the House representing the people of Timmins—James Bay and to speak to Bill C-52, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act.

Trains play a huge role in the life and the history of our country. For any boy growing up, the thing we all wanted to be was a train. I spent my life on the Ontario Northland as a kid. My great grandfather used to be the conductor on the Sydney Flyer in Nova Scotia. He lived in Iona. a little village in Cape Breton. He used to say that the only two things that we could find in the village of Iona were holy days and MacNeills. My great grandfather was a MacNeill, so John P. MacNeill was the conductor on the Sydney Flyer. John P's great skill was that he could spot bootleggers on the platform. His eye for a bootlegger was never wrong. He always said that a man carrying a bottle of whiskey with his underwear in a bag would put that bag down with just a little more care than if there were no whiskey in the bottle.

My uncles all worked on the Ontario Northland train out of North Bay and Mattawa. In those days people either worked in northern Ontario, underground in the mines, as my grandfather MacNeill and my grandfather Angus did, or on the Northlander, like my uncles did.

I had a famous uncle who apparently used to drink a twenty-sixer every night on the run from North Bay to Timmins. They said that he was never the worst for wear, although some nights after a twenty-sixer, he would say that it was like the same as working 21 straight hours and being very tired. He did not live long enough for me to be around, but he used to tell us stories about being on those trains.

My street address is Mileage 104, which is 104 miles on the Ontario Northland railway track. Every morning there is that beautiful sound of the train whistle, going past my house, shaking everything in the foundation. It used to carry people but not anymore. The provincial Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne decided that people in northern Ontario were truly second-class citizens and did not merit public transit.

Public transit is something that belongs in urban areas and to urban voters, but people in northern Ontario are somehow second class. Therefore, the Liberal government set out to destroy a 100-year-old public institution, which is the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission.

What passes by my house daily now is the wood going south, the way the wood has always gone south, and tanker cars full of sulphuric acid from the smelter in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec. The trains used to carry product from the smelter in Timmins, but the Liberals also allowed that to be killed because of their idiotic hydro pricing. We are used to seeing things being shipped out of our region on the train, but we used to be able to ship our people back and forth

Just this past weekend I had the great honour and great joy of travelling on the VIA train between Toronto and Ottawa. It was just like being a little kid again, getting on the train, the smell of the train, the feel of the train and the conductors. I felt the same excitement, but I felt a real sense of sadness. For so many regions of our country, the idea of a coherent national transit strategy, including trains, is being seen as somehow something that belongs in the 19th century as opposed to a very 21st century method of travel. I hope to us restore proper train transportation into our regions in the near future, when a New Democratic government is elected in Ontario and we get rid of that corrupt Liberal government.

The Ontario Liberals could learn that their right-wing austerity premier will be a footnote in history like Alison Redford, having promised to be a progressive premiere and then turning her back on the people. From our colleagues in Alberta, we can see how we can elect a progressive woman and actually get it.

I want to speak today about the importance of the safety transportation changes that are coming, changes that need to happen. We have seen an enormous shift in the movement of goods. Over the last five years, there has been a 28,000% increase in the transportation of fuels from western Canada, particularly on the rail lines. Trains are carrying fuel from the Bakken fields, which we know is highly combustible. They are also carrying diluted bitumen and heavy crude.

The incredible increase of this transportation on the transit system has raised serious questions about issues of safety, particularly when we saw the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic.

However, warnings about a potential rail tragedy have been discussed in Parliament for many years. I remember being here in 2004 and trying to get the Liberal government of Paul Martin to see some common sense, which it refused to see. The Liberal government believed that privatizing, allowing companies to look after themselves, getting rid of inspectors and saving money for the government would somehow make things better. Therefore, the Liberal government brought in changes to the Railway Safety Act. The Liberals went to the self-management system and told us that was the future.

It was just like the Liberals told us at that that they could do the same thing for the banking rules. The push at that time was to change Canada's banking laws to allow the banks to self-regulate. We were told in the House of Commons that the NDP was somehow the nanny state NDP because we said that we needed rules around banking. However, at the time, my Liberal colleagues thought that the great future was in City Bank and the amalgamation and investment that was happening in the United States. We saw how that ended up.

In good times, it is easy to say that we do not need regulation. In good times it is easy to say that we should let everything happen and things will carry on. We know our role as regulators is to ensure we have basic rules in place to protect people from potential accidents.

After the changes that came in under the Liberals in self-management, we found there was a whole series of increases in accidents, but because the companies were self-managed, they did not bother to report them. The Transportation Safety Board in 2005 became suspicious of CN's accident numbers compared to other operators. All of a sudden there was a large discrepancy of the number of derailments or lack of derailments. It turned out that over 1,800 derailments and accidents were simply not reported, including 44 that happened on key rail arteries. We have oversight because we want to ensure that when companies are self-regulating, they do not do what they did at that time, which was simply not bothering to report. This is a very serious issue, particularly in light of the accidents we have seen recently.

In my region of northern Ontario, we have had three serious train derailments on the rural subdivision at Hornepayne and two at Gogama. The last two incidents were February 14 and March 7, with CN freight trains carrying between 94 and 100 cars. The March 7 train was 6,089 feet long. A staggering amount of crude oil was being carried on that track.

They had come on the rural subdivision that exists between Capreol, in the south toward Sudbury and Hornepayne. It is primarily composed of a continuous welded rail and is classified as class 4 track under the transportation safety rules. Class 4 is the second-highest rating and allows trains to travel 60 miles an hour for freight and 80 miles an hour for passenger trains. However, we do not see many passenger trains anymore in the north. There were a number of slow orders given because of problems along that track. We had the accident on February 14 at Gogama and then again on March 7. At the time of the March 7 derailment, the eastbound freight was moving at 43 miles an hour and at 2:40 in the morning, at a temperature of -10C, the train jumped the tracks and cars spilled into the Mattagami River.

What was very disturbing about the 700 feet of track that was destroyed at that junction and the cars going in was that a great deal of work had happened in our region in terms of the Mattagami River, which is one of the great northern river systems feeding into James Bay. A lot of work has been done to secure fisheries and build up spawning grounds. Having heavy crude pouring into and burning across that river system was certainly deeply disturbing for residents of my region. They see that as one of the great river systems of northern Ontario.

The issue of transportation safety, given the huge increase in combustible fuels that are being transported on trains, is very serious because many communities were built on the rail line. Therefore, trains actually travel through the centre of many communities across western Canada and northern Ontario. In Sudbury, cars sit at lights as trains speed by. If the Gogama derailment had happened in an urban area, it could have been a tragedy in the nature of Lac-Mégantic.

What do we do to alleviate this? Whenever we talk about the transportation of dangerous goods, whether it is through a pipeline or by rail, we have to ensure there are rules in place for oversight and public safety. There are some very positive elements in this bill, which the New Democrats will be supporting, such as putting in place minimum insurance levels for railways transporting dangerous goods based on the type and volume of goods being transported and also establishing a disaster relief fund to deal with accidents such as occurred in Lac-Mégantic.

There have also been a number of changes, including increased powers for inspectors. This is important to have. Is this enough? Given the potential damage that could be caused by a catastrophic train derailment, perhaps not. We need to speak to this. The issue of polluter pays is a fundamental principle that Canadians agree with and in improving rail liability and accountability, we do not want the public on the hook for any potentially catastrophic disaster. Therefore, the question is how to establish a regime that is still profitable and able to transport goods by rail. We want to ensure that rail remains a profitable system, while also assuring the public that in cases of liability, there will not be fly-by-nighters, like happened at Lac-Mégantic, saying that they do not have any money and wanting to skip town. That is not good enough, not when lives and the environment are at stake.

Essentially, Bill C-52 would require minimum insurance levels for railways transporting dangerous goods and would establish a disaster relief fund paid for by crude shippers. However, regarding the issue of minimum insurance levels from $25 million for companies transporting low-risk goods up to a maximum of $1 billion for railways transporting high-risk goods, the question is at what point we would get to a level within the fund where money would available to offset a potential disaster.

I would like to compare what happened in Gogama with the situation in Kalamazoo. In the Kalamazoo blowout, it was a pipeline and not a rail disaster, but that pipeline was carrying raw bitumen. When the bitumen hit the water, cleaning it up was not so simple. In fact, it has cost over $1 billion to attempt to remediate the bitumen in the Kalamazoo River. Bitumen is a very difficult and dangerous product to deal with, especially when it sinks to the bottom. The chemicals that are involved make it a very different issue.

Whether we are talking about pipelines or rail, we get back to one of the root issues, which is that we need to move toward upgrading at source as much as possible to limit the potential for environmental damage. Also, we need to ensure that we see the benefit of whatever we produce in Canada, in terms of natural raw materials, as much as possible. We need to have discussions in the House of Commons about how to limit the environmental damage from such massive projects, because we are in a world that deals with the potential for catastrophic climate change and the government has literally buried its head in the oil sands, refusing to deal with its international obligations.

However, as Canadians, we need to deal with this. Canadians feels very inspired to take action on this. We have seen, with the recent New Democratic Party win in Alberta, that Albertans are deeply concerned about how we make developments that are sustainable, how to limit the impact of greenhouse gases, how to ensure that if we transport our incredible natural resources, which we are blessed with right across the country, we get the maximum benefits, so that Canada is not just a place where the ground is ripped out and products are shipped to refineries in Texas or to China, but we see the benefit from that.

These are all interrelated issues that really need to be discussed in Parliament. We need to have a national conversation about where we are going with this.

The bill, in response to the situation in Lac-Mégantic, is a good first step. As I said, we in the New Democratic Party have many questions about whether this insurance is enough. We certainly question some of the numbers.

For the 200,000 barrels of oil transported daily, Transport Canada estimates that oil levies would contribute about $17 million annually to general revenues. This is a step forward, but there are certainly outstanding concerns. We would need to have the levy in place for about 15 years before we reached the $250-million level where it believes we would be able to respond to any level of crisis. I would again point to Lac-Mégantic. It cost $400 million for the damage done in that one accident. Therefore, this levy would certainly not be enough.

Under the legislated summary we received from the Library of Parliament, the act would amend the Railway Act to allow a province or municipality that incurs costs in responding to a fire that was, in its opinion, the result of a rail company's railway operations to apply to the Canada Transportation Agency to have those costs reimbursed by the rail company. That is an important role, but we also need to work closely with municipalities. They are very concerned about the kinds of dangerous goods being transported through their communities and the need for plans to make sure that if something did blow out, such as in Toronto, where the rail line comes right through parts of the city, we would all be working together on this.

The Canadian Federation of Municipalities certainly supports what the New Democrats have been saying. It is interested in the issues of insurance and liability. Brad Woodside, who is president, called for a “comprehensive approach that makes railways and crude oil shippers pay the full costs of rail disasters, and not leave municipalities and taxpayers footing the bill”.

That is a fundamental principle. It should not be the taxpayers of the country who are subsidizing these operations. These operations need to be profitable in their own right, and they need to carry the cost of the potential damage through proper insurance.

The Railway Association of Canada believes that the compensation fund should cover the cost of not only crude oil but other dangerous goods, such as chlorine, which is a very interesting element. In my region, they are carrying tanker cars full of sulphuric acid on the rail lines. I remember a number of years ago when the ONR line went over just south of Temagami and pretty much destroyed a lake because of the amount of sulphuric acid that entered the water. These rail lines are carrying very dangerous goods at times, and we need to have that overall policy.

The Canadian Transportation Agency has said:

The tragic derailment in Lac-Mégantic has raised important questions regarding the adequacy of third party liability insurance coverage to deal with catastrophic events, especially for smaller railways.

This is another important issue in terms of what we saw at Lac-Mégantic, where we had a small, fly-by-night company that, when the damage was done, simply was not going to be around the next day to deal with it.

In closing, this improvement in rail safety and the creation of a fund is important, but we still need to have that conversation about how to ensure that the industry is covering off its own costs so that municipalities, provinces, and the federal government are not on the hook. We need to make sure that the federal government maintains an active role. After those years when the Liberal government allowed self-regulation and we saw numerous increases in accidents and a decline in safety, we need to make sure that there are independent inspectors and that the companies are accountable.

Finally, we need to continue the national conversation about how we are going to process oil, bitumen, and other natural resources in our country.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate many of the comments by the member, with exception, of course, to the opportunity he took to slam the Liberal Party. Some might applaud that.

There is no doubt that the rail industry is a critical industry in Canada. It is an area where we cannot really afford to make mistakes. Canadians, justifiably, are concerned about the issue of rail line safety. They want the government to have sound regulations and laws to ensure that our communities are protected.

In Winnipeg alone, where we have the CN yards or the CP yards, which border the south end of Winnipeg North, these are very important job creators. They provide all sorts of opportunities in terms of shipping.

We recognize the importance of the rail line industry, but if we want to see it continue to grow in the future, would the member not agree that it is time to spend more energy and resources in debate here in the House to ensure that we have the safest possible lines throughout the country?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is essential that we maintain public confidence in the rail system. Again, sometimes people think that it was a 19th century idea that brought the country together. It needs to be seen as a 21st century means of communication, not just for the transportation of goods and products coming from western Canada but for the re-imagining of a national vision of transportation for people.

I will give an example from my region in northern Ontario, as my colleague mentioned his community in Winnipeg. Our roads are in a brutally dangerous condition because of the privatization of highway maintenance under the provincial Liberal government. People do not have confidence, but they have confidence travelling by train. The train gets through in blizzards, where road traffic is often shut down.

As much as we talk about the increase in the transportation of goods by rail, we have seen an incredible increase in transportation on highways. These are issues of safety, so I agree with my colleague that we need to debate in the House how we have systems of transportation that keep people safe and keep the confidence of industry in our country.

[Anne-Marie Day, NDP, Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his speech.

Although this bill is a step in the right direction, it is clearly the result of a decade of mismanagement and bad decision-making under this government.

Why do we not have a plan and concrete measures for prevention and rail maintenance? We know what poor condition our rails are in. Rail cars are being added, but as anyone who has studied physics knows, the more cars you add, the greater the force exerted when the train is on a hill.

Why did the government not go further with this bill?

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague. I have a lot of respect for the work she does. The question was clear.

We need to develop a plan to ensure that transportation is safe and secure all across Canada. We need to reassure the industry and the public regarding rail safety. Trains play an essential role in our economy and our country.

Where is the government's vision? We have a problem now because the government forgot that it has a duty to protect the rights of Canadians and that it is responsible for protecting our environment.

[Paulina Ayala, NDP, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, there is something important missing from this bill. In Europe, everything is highly interconnected. In May 1985, they agreed to implement dangerous goods regulations. They even defined 13 classes of dangerous goods. Shippers and carriers have responsibilities.

Still, this bill is a step forward. If we look at the past, we can see that the Liberals moved backward 14 years after 1985 by starting the rail safety deregulation process. The Conservatives continued that process. Then Lac-Mégantic happened. There is one thing I find especially striking. These days, people talk about the danger of terrorism. In Lac-Mégantic, however, dozens of Quebeckers died, and children are now orphans. I think that rail safety should be a top priority.

Does my colleague agree that this bill should be more specific about listing dangerous goods? This is not just about oil.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, certainly this is something we are even hearing from the train industry. It is not just that we are taking oil from the Bakken oil fields, which is very combustible. We have chlorine, sulphuric acid, and other products that are being carried on the train. If we talk to firefighters in the municipalities across the country, they want to know. They want to have a plan.

This is where the federal government needs to stop treating itself as being above and separate from the rest of the country in terms of coordinating a plan. We need to work with municipalities. We need to encourage them to be part of this conversation. We need to ensure that industry is paying its full weight.

Having said that, the train is a vital link to us, but we have to have confidence in it, and it has to be able to guarantee the security of people and the environment.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today to speak to Bill C-52.

I am pleased to rise in my place to speak in favour of Bill C-52, the Safe and Accountable Rail Act. This is a bill that, among other things, would take accountability and liability for the rail transportation of dangerous goods and share it between railways and shippers. Together they would pay the costs associated with cleanup and compensation in catastrophic rail accidents, such as the one that took place in Lac-Mégantic.

It is great to have the opportunity to participate in this debate today, because railway safety is a top priority in my riding of Brant and in the city of Brantford. I have had regular meetings with city representatives and local officials to hear about their concerns in the wake of the recent disasters, and I am pleased that our Minister of Transport continues to take firm action to ensure greater safety and accountability on our railways.

I also appreciate having the opportunity to recognize the hard work and strong advocacy of Brant County Fire Chief Paul Boissonneault, who has shown great leadership on issues related to rail safety in Canadian communities. Paul is Canada's top fire chief, and during his tenure as president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, he has travelled across Canada working to ensure that first responders and Canadian communities are better protected when dangerous goods are being transported. He sat on the Emergency Response Assistance Program Working Group and the transportation of dangerous goods advisory council, and he has also appeared before the Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities, including as part of its deliberations on this bill, Bill C-52.

He has stated that overall, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs welcomes Bill C-52, because it would define the liability of railways in order to provide claimants with greater certainty of compensation and because it would build upon recent government actions focused on strengthening rail safety. Chief Boissonneault continues to push for further measures to improve safety and accountability, and we look forward to continuing the work we have started with him.

The bill before us today represents another important step in the right direction. Hon. members will recall that the tragedy in July 2013 was caused by the explosion of tank cars carrying crude oil.

There has been a dramatic increase in the amount of crude oil shipped by rail. In 2008, hardly any crude oil moved on Canadian rail lines. By 2013, oil by rail had increased to approximately 10.6 million tonnes per year. By 2017, that number is expected to reach approximately 33.9 million tonnes per year.

The shipment of crude oil by rail will continue to play an important role in moving our resources to market. Even if pipelines in the east, west, and south of the oil fields and oil sands were approved tomorrow, it would be many years before they were operational. Until such time as new pipelines are available, rail remains the only real transportation alternative. Nor do railways have any option but to accept shipments of oil from their customers. The common carrier obligations of the Canada Transportation Act are a hallmark of the railway system that ensures that shippers can get their goods to market. Railways cannot turn down shipments of crude oil just because oil is volatile and is classified as a dangerous good. They are exposed to the liabilities associated with the freight they are required to move.

Railways are responsible for carrying insurance to provide compensation for the liabilities associated with disasters such as Lac-Mégantic. The bill before us would enhance insurance requirements by setting required minimum insurance levels for federally regulated railways that would take into account the potential severity of accidents. These would range from $25 million to $1 billion, based on the type and volume of dangerous goods the railway carried.

To enforce compliance, if a railway failed to notify the Canada Transportation Agency of an operational change that would affect its insurance, it would be subject to an administrative monetary penalty of up to $100,000 per violation.

As the tragic derailment in Lac-Mégantic demonstrates, accidents involving crude oil can be catastrophic in nature. To address such incidents where, despite increased requirements, the amount of railway insurance may be inadequate to pay for all liabilities, a two-tiered approach is proposed in the bill.

First, the bill before us would change the liability regime for rail accidents, including crude oil. In the event of an incident involving crude oil, railways physically or operationally involved in the accident would be held liable up to their insurance without fault or negligence having to be proven. When the cost of a rail accident exceeds a railway's insurance level, the bill provides for a way to cover the cost of such disasters without putting the burden on the shoulders of the taxpayer. This would be accomplished through the establishment of a supplemental shipper-financed fund.

This brings us to the polluter pays principle, which Canada is making a gold standard for nuclear energy and offshore oil production, and other modes of transportation, including pipelines and marine. Hon. members may be aware that Canada was a pioneer in implementing this principle beginning with the liability regime for marine oil spills. Since the 1970s, shipowners have been held strictly liable for costs and damages that result from the discharge of oil. To cover claims in excess of the shipowner's limit of liability, the government created a marine pollution claims fund, which is now known as the ship-source oil pollution fund.

This is the approach that we have applied to marine oil tankers, and it would also apply to the transportation of crude oil by rail as a result of the bill before us. In future years, it could apply as well to the transportation of other dangerous goods by rail.

Any liabilities that result from an accident involving crude oil above the railway's insurance level would be covered by the shipper-financed fund, known as the fund for railway accidents involving designated goods. The two-tiered regime outlined in the bill would share responsibility for damages from rail accidents between railways and shippers and ensure that adequate resources would be available to pay for all liabilities This approach, modelled on the marine mode, would achieve two important goals. First, it would give potential victims more certainty regarding compensation claims. Second, it would relieve taxpayers of excess liabilities that can result from an accident.

In summary, this bill would ensure that railways maintain appropriate insurance coverage. In addition, it would also ensure that their liability is clearly defined to more quickly address claims following rail accidents involving crude oil, and it would ensure that resources are available to pay compensation for all liabilities associated with an accident.

Let me be clear. The government's first priority is the safety of our transportation system, but in the event of a rail accident, the bill would ensure that the polluter will pay. I urge hon. members to adopt this bill.

[Peggy Nash, NDP, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, while the bill is a step forward in rail insurance, although the major carriers already carry more than this amount of insurance, it does nothing to address many of the fundamental problems that have led to a dramatic increase in rail accidents.

One of those fundamental problems was the introduction of safety management systems, which was brought in by the Liberals and has continued under the Conservatives. After its introduction in 2001, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of rail accidents.

The carriage of volatile Bakken crude and dilbit has increased many times over this period. The DOT-111 railway cars will be with us for some time and are going through residential, densely populated urban neighbourhoods as well as through communities across this country. What immediate measures is the government going to take so that we can be absolutely sure that the kind of disaster faced by the community of Lac-Mégantic and other accidents across this country is not repeated?

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, let me assure the hon. member that I well know about railways going through cities. There is one within a block of my own private residence, which is where my children grew up. I know well about the main line running right through, literally, the middle of our community.

Let me say this. As we have move forward on the file, the minister is doing all the immediate things that should be done, in terms of taking forward the safety features that we need to replace the outdated railcars. Many of them are being replaced.

However, let me also make the comment that as the number of railcars carrying volatile products, particularly crude oil, is increasing so dramatically so, too, are the risks increasing for accidents.

Is there a government, is there a person in Ottawa who can stop accidents from happening? Absolutely not. There is not one of us in this place, or any other place outside in the community, who can literally stop an accident. We could put in all the safety features, but there will always be risks.

We need to mitigate the risks. That is what the minister has been doing, particularly on the replacement to the current old standard of railcar transportation. As mentioned, in my words, we are moving toward ensuring that when an accident happens, the polluter and the shipper will pay.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I met with members of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and with firefighters who were on the Hill recently, talking about this very specific issue. The federation continues to be very concerned about the issue of disclosure. Firefighters, in particular, are also concerned. They are not getting advance disclosure; the reason being there is some sort of proprietary interest, there is some sort of national security interest at play here. The firefighters need this information for two reasons. One is that established firefighters inside cities with full-time firefighting forces need to know ahead of time what kinds of disasters they are confronting and need the information in a timely way. In rural municipalities, where they have volunteer firefighters, there is no capacity for training, there is no capacity for advance warning. Assembling the firefighting crew when a disaster occurs is the priority, not finding out exactly what the nature of the fire is.

Why will the government not provide advance disclosure of dangerous goods being shipped through urban and rural areas? Why is it relying upon notification after the fact or in real time when real time is not necessarily effective?

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, the chief from my county, which is a volunteer fire service, is also the president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, is very pleased with the progress the bill would make.

Is there more that can be done? Obviously, there is.

One of the aspects that he and I have talked extensively about is the training of volunteer firefighters on how to deal with situations. We are moving forward on that file, with their association. They are putting together what is needed and what is required, because they are the first responders. This is moving forward on these immediate needs as first priority and, also, to ensure the safety standards are in place for firefighters, for the first responders. They know what is happening through their community as it happens in real time, as has been mentioned. Those are the standards we are jointly working toward as the government.

The House resumed from May 12 consideration of the motion that Bill C-52, An Act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act, be read the third time and passed.

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to the bill before us, the safe and accountable rail act. The bill would fulfill this title by strengthening safety in our efforts to further improve safety management systems in the rail transportation industry. This is especially vital for addressing safety risks before they become bigger problems and before accidents occur.

Railways are a vital part of Canada's transportation system and keeping them safe is everyone's concern. The railway industry and the government need to work together to protect the health and safety of Canadians and to secure the conditions for a prosperous economy.

In the past, railways and many other safety-critical industries pursued safety through compliance with prescriptive rules and regulations. As safety research progressed during the 1990s, however, it became clear that compliance with rules and regulations alone was insufficient to ensure the highest possible levels of safety. What companies needed for a truly effective safety regime was a proactive system approach to safety that allowed them to identify hazards and to mitigate risks in order to prevent accidents. This approach also allowed lessons learned from minor incidents and day-to-day operations to be included in the system, thereby creating a sea of continuous safety improvement with more likelihood of avoiding accidents.

When the railway safety management system regulations first came into force in March 2001, they were the first of their kind in the federal transportation sector. They were created with significant industry input and emphasized the railways' responsibilities for safe operations. The regulations were established to encourage the development of a safety culture throughout all levels of an organization and to ensure that safety is considered as a factor in all decisions.

The safety management system helps organizations better comply with regulatory requirements and demonstrate their commitment to the safety of their employees. Key elements of safety management systems include, for instance, the development of safety goals and performance targets, risk assessments, responsibilities and authorities, processes and procedures, and monitoring and evaluating. Achieving an effective safety culture is the ultimate goal of safety management systems. An effective safety culture in a company can contribute to reducing public and employee fatalities and injuries, property damage resulting from railway accidents, and the impact of accidents on the environment.

Since the introduction of the railway safety management system regulations in 2001, a lot has been done and much has changed. Our railway network is characterized and challenged by a growing user base, vast distances, new and aging infrastructure, and a significant rise in oil on rail. Regulated safety management systems have come a long way since their beginnings. They have now been implemented in rail, marine and aviation transportation modes in Canada, and have become an international standard for managing safety.

The importance of safety management systems and their implementation in Canadian railway systems was one of the most significant issues researched during the last Railway Safety Act review and a simultaneous study of rail safety in Canada undertaken by the Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. While safety management systems were generally supported, both reviews concluded that implementation among the companies was uneven and that more needed to be done by the companies and the regulator to ensure full implementation throughout the industry. As a result, Transport Canada made several amendments to the Railway Safety Act in May 2013, to increase rail safety by strengthening its oversight and enforcement capacity, and expanding safety management systems for railways. Following these amendments, Transport Canada accelerated the development of the new railway safety management system regulations, 2015, which came into force on April 1.

The new regulations improve the implementation of safety management systems by incorporating more detailed requirements to clarify expectations from both industry and the department. The new regulations also improve the overall consistency and quality of railway safety management systems by adding consistent terminology, provisions requiring evidence of implementation, requirements for the identification of an accountable executive and the creation of a policy protecting employees from reprisal for reporting contraventions, and by expanding application to local railway companies.

However, our government is not stopping there. This bill introduces an amendment that would not only make sure that railway safety measurement systems exist, but that they are also working and are effective. Under the current Railway Safety Act, the Minister of Transport can take enforcement actions, including prosecution, for any non-compliance with the railway safety management system regulations.

The minister can even order a railway company to take corrective measures, should the minister be of the opinion that the company's safety management system presents deficiencies that risk compromising safe railway operations. However, the current Railway Safety Act lacks the authority to address issues with the way the rail companies implement their safety management systems. This bill would fill that gap by introducing a new power for the minister to order a company to take corrective measures should a company's implementation of its safety management system risk compromising safety.

This new power would also allow the minister to order corrective action if a company is not following its safety management system procedures and policies to the extent of risking safe railway operations.

Fairness is also paramount to this proposed amendment, to further strengthen railway safety management systems. Similar to the current safety management systems power related to deficiencies in a company's system, an order made under this new power would be subject to review by the Transportation Appeal Tribunal of Canada; this at the request of the company.

Together, the rail industry and government have accomplished tremendous work toward enhancing the safety of our railway network in the last decade and continuously improving company safety culture, but we still have more to do to make our railway system safer. Transportation safety is crucial, not only for the welfare of families and communities in Canada but to support Canada's long-term economic growth. We need to continue to work together to achieve our goal of giving all Canadians a safer and more responsible railway system and to assure global markets that our transportation systems are not only efficient but also safe and secure.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments from my colleague opposite. One of the things he suggests is that the system would become safer because the minister would have the power to order a railway company to comply if she or he finds that the safety management system is not being properly implemented. However, as we have discovered from the Auditor General's report, Transport Canada has failed miserably at examining the safety management systems of the rail companies, and as a result was given a failing grade by the Auditor General in terms of the audits of those safety management systems.

How can the minister actually make an order if the Transport Canada folks are not even able to look at safety management systems to see if they are actually compliant?

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, obviously any direction or order taken by the minister would be contingent upon the minister's departmental staff doing the proper inspections. We all know that we have increased our capacity to make such inspections. We have doubled down on the safety as a result of tragedies that have occurred. Obviously, we are going to put our utmost attention to ensuring that tragedies and accidents in the future are minimized through careful scrutiny of all safety regulations.

The minister would be able to make directions when shortcomings are noticed. Certainly, that is the full intent of this act: to make the railway safer for all Canadians while enhancing Canada's economy.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed my hon. colleague's comments. I would like to hear what the position of the government is in terms of its reasoning for deciding to impose the responsibility on the railways only, in terms of liability insurance, and not on shippers as well or some mixture of the two. I am interested in the member's response to this. The railway companies argue that they do not always have control over what is in the cars that they move.

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, obviously no system is perfect, but certainly the user-pay principle is one that is tried and true. There have been increased issues with regard to compensation and liability, which this government has put in place to protect the public. We will continue to go in that direction. Obviously, we will continue to strengthen the system as we see fit.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I note that the title of the bill is “an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act”. I heard the member say in his speech that there is much more to do on the issue of rail safety in Canada. This is a bill, even though we will be supporting it on this side, that is very light in the way of changes to increase rail safety in Canada. The member has acknowledged that there is much more to do. On this pressing issue of public safety for Canadians, why did the Conservatives not take advantage of this opportunity to do more now?

[Robert Goguen, Conservative, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Mr. Speaker, perfection should never be the enemy of the good, and yes, there is more to do, but these are complex issues.

We know that Canada has a vast railway system, and we know the issues will vary from region to region. Obviously, more study and attention to detail and getting it right the first time is what would be paramount in the mind of this government, of course, while ensuring safety of the public in Canada.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Beaches—East York.

I note that the bill would adopt one of the things that the NDP has been calling for, which is the polluter pay principle, so that at any time there is damage to our environment caused by industry, or in this case by railroads and industry, there would be recognition on the part of governments everywhere that the polluter should be responsible for the cleanup and pay for the cost of the cleanup. The bill before us goes a small way toward ensuring that would take place.

Of course, we know the history of where the bill originated, and we have been talking about rail safety since the disaster at Lac-Mégantic. This was a tragedy that killed 47 people, wrecked the town and cost half a billion in cleanup. However, the rail system, as we have it now in Canada, has not been sufficient to protect towns, villages and cities along the way, and the people who reside in them, from the consequences of the enormous increase in the transportation of dangerous goods by rail.

Up until 2009, there were maybe 500 railcars transporting dangerous oil by rail. Since that time, the level of this material has gone up by something like 400-fold, so that we are now seeing 200,000 barrels a day travelling through our communities.

Originally, people thought those barrels of oil were fairly benign. Crude oil is a heavy, massive weight substance that does not catch fire very easily. However, little did we know, with the advent of fracking and diluted bitumen, we now have transportation of goods that are explosive, not just flammable. As a result, we are now transporting what people have referred to as “bomb trains” through our cities and countryside, and throughout the entire country.

The notion of bomb trains is not lost on the people of Canada, and when it happens, we need to have a regimen that actually keeps them safe. It is one thing to suggest, as some on the opposite side have suggested, that if we do not put it in trains, we could put it in pipelines and that we cannot have it both ways: we cannot be opposed to transporting it via pipelines and trains. However, in fact, this material is so dangerous, it is not allowed to be in pipelines. It has too much gas in it, which provides too much pressure. Therefore, the only way it can be transported is by truck and by train.

It is up to the Government of Canada to ensure that, if this is how we are going to transport our natural resources, the transportation is done in a way that is safe and in a way that protects the citizens of the country.

In my riding of York South—Weston, there are three separate rail corridors. Two are on the edges of the riding and one goes right through the centre of the riding. The one that goes through the centre and the one at the bottom edge are both CP main lines. Those corridors carry tremendous quantities of this crude oil in these big black tanker cars, which everybody learned the name of after Lac-Mégantic: DOT-111s.

The minister, shortly after the Lac-Mégantic disaster, announced new emergency directives where the rail companies were not allowed to have single-person crews, have these trains unattended or transport dangerous goods without having two people on the crew. She also announced that they would be eliminating the use of the DOT-111s within three years.

In what universe does that make us safer? For three years then we have to live with the reality that these bomb trains are going past communities, including my community of York South—Weston. Therefore, these bomb trains are still a feature of the urban landscape and something we have to be extremely vigilant about, and I do not believe that the current Conservative government has been vigilant enough.

The bill would do two things.

It would create a regimen whereby the rail company shares the liability with the shippers in terms of dangerous goods. Ultimately, the rail companies would theoretically be responsible for the entire cost in conjunction with the shippers. However, in regards to the cost at Lac-Mégantic, the government has made it very clear that the Province of Quebec will continue to be on the hook for that cleanup, because there was not enough insurance in the system before Lac-Mégantic took place. MMA, the railroad that was involved in the Lac-Mégantic disaster, had $25 million of insurance which was quickly exhausted, and the governments then took up the rest of it, not shippers and not the rest of the railroads.

In terms of the dangers of these rail cars going past our communities, there have been some good moves by the government, but there clearly is not enough. Since Lac-Mégantic, there have been at least seven other massive explosions and collisions of these bomb trains in Canada and the United States. There has been Aliceville, Alabama; Casselton, North Dakota; New Brunswick; West Virginia; Saskatchewan; Gogama; and, more recently, Heimdal, North Dakota.

In some of those occurrences, the cars were not DOT-111s. They were the newer cars, the CPC-1232s. Apparently those newer cars, when they break in a collision, blow up just like the DOT-111s. That is what has been happening all across North America.

What is the solution? The minister has said we are going to replace these with the DOT-117 cars, in 10 years. We have now gone from a 3-year window, which is quickly running down, to a 10-year window before our communities will start to feel safe. We do not even know what is safe about these new DOT-117 cars.

The minister has also lowered the speeds through urban centres to 40 miles an hour, or about 62 kilometres an hour. All of the collisions in recent memory, including one of the two at Gogama, have been at speeds that were less than the speed the minister says is safe in urban areas. How is that to make us feel safe? It does not. The residents of York South—Weston do not feel safe and are demanding that the government do something more.

The government did ask the railroads last year to provide them with route analyses and risk assessments. The route analyses are because we are aware that in the United States, governments there have directed railroads to steer clear of major urban centres like Washington, D.C. They are not allowed to travel through that community.

However, here in Canada, the railroads were given the option to come up with a route analysis and decide for themselves whether it is too risky to go through towns. We asked to see those risk assessments that were done by the railroads for the ministry. Transport Canada said that they were the private property of the railroads. We asked the railroads to give us a copy of the risk assessment, and the railroad said that Transport Canada was free to give us a copy. Then the minister came to the committee and said that they are not. We are still no clearer.

I was at a meeting last week of emergency services on rail safety in the city of Toronto, called because the city has determined it would like to know what Toronto emergency services need. Toronto emergency services confirmed that they do not know what the railroads' risk assessments are. They do not know how risky it is, and where the hot spots are likely to be if there is a problem in a rail corridor running through the city of Toronto. They still do not know, except on an annual basis, at the end of a year, what dangerous goods are going through the city.

It seems ludicrous to consider that information to be private and confidential to the railroads when it is the life and limb of the residents of the city of Toronto, and other cities across this fair land of ours, that is at risk should something happen.

If the railroads have produced a risk assessment that says they should be going slower, then let us make them go slower. If the risk assessment says there are particular spots where they should not travel at all, that they should go around, then let us make them do that.

As far as we know, there has been zero action by the minister, by Transport Canada, by the Transportation Safety Board, or any of the agencies dealing with transportation in this country, to deal with the fact that when one of these tank cars breaks in a collision, and they break at speeds as low as 30 miles an hour, maybe even 25 miles an hour, they explode.

We have yet to hear the minister say that she will find a speed that they are safe to travel at. Until she does, the speed that these trains are travelling at through my community, through the rest of the city of Toronto, is too fast.

We are not going to create a system that is 100% safe. CN admitted that at the transport committee, after Gogama, when it said it could not make it 100% safe and can only do the best it can. We need it to be certain that these things are not going to explode in my community.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I noted in my previous question for the member across the aisle, this is an act that is intended to amend the Railway Safety Act. However, it focuses almost entirely on the issue of compensation, liability, and insurance, which is a very retrospective view on accidents. Part of the issue is that not only is rail safety in Canada a very pressing issue, one of great concern for the public about safety, but it is so in the context of rapidly increasing risk.

In fact, when the minister appeared in committee, she provided information about the transportation of oil by rail. The numbers are increasing at a phenomenal rate as we go through the years. The numbers she provided start at 78 million barrels of crude oil in 2013, and there is projected to be a quarter of a billion barrels of crude oil transported by rail by 2017 and going forward.

I am wondering if my colleague can tell us why he thinks the government has been so light on dealing with rail safety issues as part of this bill.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, he is completely right. The bill is quite light on the whole issue of safety. It gives the minister a few more powers, but those powers require knowledge in the minister's hands. Clearly, Transport Canada is not doing the inspections necessary to determine whether the railroads are keeping the lines safe.

This bill is in fact a gift to the major railroads, CN and CP, which were carrying over $1 billion worth of insurance. They now only have to carry $1 billion, so they have had their insurance costs reduced, and above $1 billion they are not liable. They cannot be liable unless they acted in a way that was deliberately in contravention of safety regulations. It is only if they were deliberate about it.

Therefore, it is essentially a gift to the big railroads. It would fill in a gap for the smaller railroads that now have to carry more than $25 million of insurance, and it would provide for a fund. However, the fund will take 15 years to fill up, and even then we do not know if it will be enough.

The bill does not contain a whole lot to make us feel safer in this town of ours.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, where I agree with the member is on the ever-growing demand and expansion of the transportation of crude oil. His colleague made reference to how profound it is going to be on our rail lines in terms of more than doubling over the next number of years. We in the Liberal Party feel it is absolutely critical that we have a safe rail line system to protect the interests of all Canadians, no matter what region they live in and wherever the line goes through with the crude.

However, there is another side to this, which the member made reference to, and that is the issue of pipelines. In listening to what they were saying, it seems that New Democrats have excluded the potential benefits of expanding pipelines in order to alleviate some of the pressure of transporting crude oil on the rail lines.

I am wondering if he could comment on whether he believes there should be more pipelines in order to alleviate some of the pressures of transporting oil in communities in Canada.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Of course, Mr. Speaker, it was the Liberal government that brought in the Railway Safety Act, which in fact took away the responsibility of direct oversight from the federal government and turned it over to the railroads themselves.

However, in terms of pipelines, it is my clear understanding that crude oil has too much gas in it to be transported in any pipeline. It cannot be transported in a pipeline and has to be transported by rail. The maximum pressure that is allowed inside a pipeline to prevent a pipeline from bursting is 19.7 kilopascals, and this stuff generates greater pressure than that. As a result, the only option, without pre-treating all of the oil at great expense to the oil companies, is to transport it by rail.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Bill C-52, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act. The bill is returning to us from committee where we heard testimony from witnesses, representatives like Safe Rail Communities in the Toronto area, who share the NDP's view that “Although it has some promising elements...Bill C-52 could go further to ensure safety and accountability”.

Opportunities were missed here, but nevertheless I stand in support of the bill in light of the need for an immediate response to rail safety issues in Canada.

As I have mentioned in the House before, the growing frequency of train derailments since the disaster in Lac-Mégantic has led to many Conservative promises to rectify shortcomings with safety inspections and rail safety compliance measures. The Conservatives have yet to honour that commitment, and the bill goes nowhere near what they need to do to honour those commitments.

With three train derailments occurring in the span of a month last year, this is a pressing issue. It is one that the government has been scrambling to catch up with and has still not caught up.

So far, these accidents have occurred in rural areas. As the critic for urban affairs, I would note that the bill would do little to alleviate the costs and the human tragedy inevitably associated with a derailment in one of our big cities, one of our dense urban communities in this country.

Starting with the Liberal government, in 1999, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have let companies self-regulate and self-inspect their equipment and railway lines. This approach is clearly not working.

The bill put forward by the minister is an effort to address some of the liability and accountability issues associated with rail safety. It proposes several necessary fixes, but it is just a start.

It appears to me that the government is in no hurry to catch up on rail safety issues. We heard the member across the aisle today talking about the need for more study, while communities across this country are anxious about dangerous goods being transported by rail quite literally through their backyards.

The bill sets out to provide some compensation for victims of derailments after the fact. It is as if the government has accepted the inevitability of train derailments in this country. We not only need stronger laws, but we need stronger enforcement of laws and regulations, and we need penalties on those who break them.

It is clear to us and to experts such as the Transportation Safety Board that the government has very serious problems in terms of oversight inspections and audits. Nevertheless, the proposed changes in the bill remain necessary, and while not fully or nearly adequate, they have the support of this side of the House.

Bill C-52 sets out to do three main things. It requires minimum insurance levels for railways transporting dangerous goods. It establishes a disaster relief fund paid for by crude oil shippers to compensate victims of derailments, provinces, and municipalities, and it gives more authority to the minister, cabinet, and railway safety inspectors.

With respect to minimum insurance levels, the bill provides for a legislated minimum insurance coverage of $25 million for railway companies transporting minimal quantities of dangerous goods, and up to a maximum of $1 billion for railways that are transporting substantial quantities of dangerous goods. Railway companies will be liable for losses, damages, costs, and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or other designated goods, up to the level of the company's minimum liability insurance coverage.

Based on the costs of train derailments like that in Lac-Mégantic, these measures appear to be justified.

After that disaster, the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway exhausted its insurance coverage of only $25 million and went bankrupt. Yet damages paid by taxpayers with respect to that derailment have been to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The Quebec government has estimated that the total cost will be well over $400 million.

The second thing the bill sets out to do is establish a pooled disaster relief fund to be made available if the minimum insurance levels are insufficient or exceeded. While this is a step forward, there are outstanding concerns that this also may not be sufficient in the event that another major disaster, particularly in an urban area.

When it comes to disaster relief, the first responders on the scene will inevitably be firefighters and sometimes the police. For that reason, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs asked that the committee consider a mechanism to fund training, such as through a small allocation of the disaster relief fund, since the bill did not address the serious firefighter training gap that currently existed in Canada. Indeed, equipping and supporting municipal first responders to rail emergencies is of the utmost importance, yet this important aspect is not addressed by the bill and there is no ability to fund training out of this pooled fund.

When my colleague from Brossard—La Prairie followed up at committee on the recommendation from the fire chiefs to use this relief fund to pay for this training, representatives from Transport Canada admitted that the resources had not been a key focus at this point of this bill, but that those questions would come up as they “work through the ways in which we can improve the system as a set of jurisdictions and responsible authorities”.

This is evidence of the government being excessively casual on this pressing issue of public safety. It reveals a lack of urgency from the government. It is a case of the Conservatives making promises but not following up with the necessary resources to back those promises up. It was the same lack of urgency exhibited by the minister in her recent announcement that Canadians would have to wait a full 10 years for the phase out of the dangerous railcars. That is far too long.

On the issue of authority to the minister, cabinet and railway safety inspectors, the bill implements a number of changes to the Railway Safety Act that would give more authority to the minister. As my colleague from York South—Weston has pointed out in practical terms, these are not real. However, railway safety inspectors would be authorized to order a person or company to take any measure they deemed necessary to mitigate a threat to the safety or security of railway operations. Therefore, providing extra authority to railway safety inspectors is a positive and gets us back to where authority ought to lie for safety, with the government and the inspectors it hires rather than safety management systems.

The amendments would also authorize the minister to order a company that was implementing its safety management system in a manner that risked compromising railway safety to take the necessary corrective measures. However, as my colleague has pointed out, it is not clear how the minister will understand or come to know what is in those safety management systems to act on those. Clearly, the missed opportunity here is that of increasing the number of inspectors. Since 2013, Transport Canada has hired just one additional rail safety inspector even though the amount of oil by rail has more than doubled in the last two years.

While the government has a responsibility to ensure that tragedies like Lac-Mégantic never happen again, we do want to ensure that railways have enough insurance to cover all costs in the event of a disaster, and the bill would do that.

Clearly, there is more to do. One of the things that is missing from the bill is defining “fatigue science” in the Railway Safety Act. It is our worry that its absence will not ensure that fatigue management is based on science. Fatigue has been said to be one of the contributing factors for train derailments. Therefore, the fact that the Conservatives refuse to do something about this issue is quite puzzling and disturbing.

On the environmental side, we want to see the polluter pays principle applied to ensure that the total environmental and cleanup costs of rail accidents are borne by the industry and not downloaded onto the taxpayers.

The most important thing, however, is that we pass this bill before the next election to ensure we take at least a small step forward, even though that step is inadequate.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member indicated that a good portion of this bill related to basic insurance requirements and a pooled fund to take care of a disaster that might happen.

First, would he agree that the pooled fund, although it is at $250,000, can pay out a larger claim, which is backstopped by the consolidated revenue fund, and then, if it is paid out, further and subsequent assessments can be made to ensure the polluter pays?

Second, what is his opinion with respect to having pipelines transport some of this crude oil as opposed to rail? Is he aware that there are plans to potentially take some of that oil through a pipeline to join it to the energy east pipeline as opposed to rail? Could he comment on that as well?

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am aware that costs in excess of the pooled disaster relief fund would be paid out of the consolidated revenue fund.

It is worth noting the costs that flowed from Lac-Mégantic. The Quebec government has put them at well over $400 million. Other estimates are much higher. I guess it depends on how one accounts for these matters. It should also be noted that those costs were mitigated by the particular geology of that area, a layer of clay not allowing the oil to seep down causing greater environmental damage than it did.

It is in light of those costs that one can anticipate a train derailment in the context of a dense urban area. It is not to be missed that hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil are being transported by rail through dense urban areas. A derailment there would have costs well in excess of those in Lac-Mégantic, and those costs would be environmental and, most tragically, human costs. There are communities of thousands of people in my city of Toronto within a stone's throw of railway tracks that are transporting thousands of barrels of oil a day in very dangerous railcars.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, rail line safety is important to Canadians and it is important to the Liberal Party. There is absolutely no doubt about that.

My question is related to the member's colleague who attempted to answer a question of mine. I would like to get clarification because I believe his colleague was wrong in his assessment.

The member made reference to the fact that we doubled transportation of crude oil via rail in the last couple of years. Given the future demand, we will see it more than double in the few short years ahead of us. One of the viable options is to look at pipelines, yet the NDP seems to take the position that we should transport oil via rail. If we listened to the previous NDP speaker, he implied we could not transport it through pipelines because of its explosive nature.

Does the member believe his colleague is right, that crude oil cannot be transported through pipelines for that increased production? Is that why the NDP has taken the position of transporting it along our rail lines?

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know what my colleague's background is or what his credentials are to pass judgment on the chemical make-up of some of the oil being transported either by rail or through pipelines, but I do know that 72 million of the barrels of oil being transported this year by rail come from Canadian sources. That is 72 million out of 162 million barrels of oil, so 90 million barrels of oil that are not of Canadian origin are being transported by rail in our country. Some of that oil comes from the Bakken oil fields, which is a highly volatile form of oil. However, I am not in a position to pass judgment on the actual chemical make-up or the challenges of transporting Bakken crude by way of our pipelines.

However, I do know that one viable alternative for dealing with this issue is dealing with our dependence on fossil fuels and limiting the amount of fossil fuels on which Canadians depend and rely. Our party has an answer to the global warming and climate change issue of which I am very proud. It comes in the form of my Bill C-619, the climate change accountability act. It would reduce the demand of Canadians for fossil fuels and reduce the need to be shipping fuel by either rail or pipeline in any direction across the country.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mississauga East—Cooksville.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in support of Bill C-52, an act to amend the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act. Many members of the House have already expressed their sound support for the safe and accountable railway act. Members opposite who have just spoken have said they are in support of the bill, so I will not repeat many of the areas that they have addressed.

Principally, the bill deals with base insurance amounts and a pooled fund to deal with disasters and ensures a structure to deal with that.

I will turn my attention today to another point of significant importance to all Canadians. That is safe grade crossings.

The safety of grade crossings is a cause championed by the member for Winnipeg South Centre, who herself proposed amendments to the Railway Safety Act through her bill, Bill C-627. She appeared before the committee to emphasize the importance of protecting people and property from unsafe railway operations. Bill C-627 and Bill C-52 have become a coordinated effort to ensure that the Minister of Transport and her officials have the mandate and powers to stop the threat to the safety of persons or property from all rail operations. It is a fairly significant addition and piece of legislative work that both the member and this particular bill address. As recognized in both these pieces of legislation, the minister must have the legislative authority to develop, administer, and enforce safety regulations of federally regulated railways.

However, our government's work goes beyond just the legislation before the House. The week of April 27 was Rail Safety Week, and we saw two important announcements that bracketed the range of rail safety challenges from local to international.

At the beginning of the week, the minister announced $9.7 million in new funding to improve safety at more than 600 grade crossings. At the end of the week, the minister and her United States counterpart announced new tank car standards in a joint United States-Canada plan to phase out rail cars that do not meet the new standards. Of course, they will be phased in, because it takes time to replace these cars. These two announcements target both local concerns—the specific places where people and trains intersect daily—and the overall safety of rail operations in Canada and the United States.

It is easy to see why Canadians are concerned about grade crossings. Canadian cities and towns grew up alongside rail lines and continued to spread around them. As subdivision plans are made and the cities continue to grow, obviously those subdivisions and those buildings will be near rail lines. As a result, we have some 37,000 public, private, and pedestrian railway crossings. Although the number of crossing accidents has fallen dramatically since 1980, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada says the risk of trains and vehicles colliding at crossings is still too high. Crossing accidents account for nearly 20% of all rail accidents in Canada, with 30% of these accidents resulting in death or serious injury.

In response to the Transportation Safety Board's call for government action on grade crossings, new grade crossing regulations came into force on November 27, 2014. These regulations and the accompanying standards are intended to help prevent accidents and improve the safety of federally regulated grade crossings.

Sometimes some small things can be done to ensure that safety is first and foremost. These include approximately 14,000 public and 9,000 private grade crossings along with more than 42,000 kilometres of federally regulated railway tracks in Canada.

The regulations that came into force on November 27, 2014, will improve safety by establishing comprehensive and enforceable safety standards for grade crossings. They clarify the roles and responsibilities of railway companies and road authorities and ensure the sharing of key safety information between rail companies and road authorities.

This last element is important. Railway companies share responsibility for grade crossing safety with road authorities, which include provinces, municipalities, band councils, and private crossing owners. All of these parties are responsible for managing railway crossing safety in Canada, so effective collaboration is crucial.

The new regulations have a phased-in approach, and railway companies and road authorities must meet all requirements over the next seven years. This phased-in approach requires immediate safety improvements at grade crossings across Canada, while allowing sufficient time to comply with all the requirements and the regulations.

The new funding for grade crossings announced on April 27, 2015, will be available through Transport Canada's grade crossing improvement program. Under this program, eligible railway crossings will be upgraded based on factors such as traffic volume and accident history. The improvements may include flashing lights and bells, gate barriers, linking crossing signals to traffic signals, upgrading to brighter LED lights, or adding new circuits or timing devices.

Transport Canada also encourages the closing of certain grade crossings under federal jurisdiction. The grade crossing closure program provides grants to crossing owners in exchange for closing a crossing. In 2014-15 Transport Canada approved $165,000 in funding to close nine crossings in the interests of public safety.

Other initiatives to improve safety at railway crossings include Operation Lifesaver. This national public education program aims to reduce loss of life, injuries, and damages caused by grade crossing collisions and pedestrian incidents. Transport Canada provides Operation Lifesaver with $300,000 per year for its outreach and education programs.

Improving safety at grade crossings is an important contribution to rail safety. Another is making all rail operations safer, especially in densely populated areas, as was already mentioned. That is why the minister issued an emergency directive this spring that set the speed limit for trains in densely populated urban areas at 64 kilometres per hour. Slower train speeds were among the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's recommendations. The directive also increases inspections and risk assessments along key routes used for the transportation of dangerous goods, include crude oil and ethanol.

The joint United States-Canada announcement on tank car standards in April was the latest step in our government's coordinated effort to improve rail safety following the Lac-Mégantic disaster. These efforts began soon after the accident and the first advisories from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.

In July 2013, Transport Canada ordered rail companies to have crews of at least two persons on trains carrying dangerous goods and imposed stricter requirements for securing unattended trains. This was followed in 2014 by a series of measures, including banning the least crash-resistant DOT-111 tank cars from carrying dangerous goods and requiring companies to phase out cars not meeting new safety standards by May 1, 2017; the coming into force of a series of new regulations, such as the Railway Safety Management System Regulations, 2015; Railway Safety Administrative Monetary Penalties Regulations, Railway Operating Certificate Regulations, and amendments to the Transportation Information Regulations to improve data collection; requiring railways to secure unattended trains with a minimum number of handbrakes and other physical defences to prevent runaways; and tightening railway labelling of hazardous materials.

With the focus on rail safety and the dangers associated with railway operations, we must not lose sight of the important role rail transportation plays and has played in Canada's economy, supporting our exports and bringing goods to Canadians. However, the shadow of Lac-Mégantic looms over anyone living near rail lines, and the daily risk of collisions at grade crossings requires that we do more to ensure rail safety.

Our government takes these potential threats very seriously and is moving to ensure that does not happen again.

I hope that all of my colleagues will join me in recognizing Bill C-52 as a key contribution to improving rail safety and will vote in favour of the bill.

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the bill is obviously a step in the right direction. It could, however, be improved, which is what a debate is for.

In light of the new products being transported by train, for example, more volatile products that the companies themselves struggle to categorize, does my colleague opposite think that the existing minimum levels are high enough? If not, what does he suggest?

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the minimum level of insurance was arrived at after discussion with stakeholders after looking at what was available in terms of insurance provisions. It also depends on the volume and amount of crude being hauled. If they were smaller companies, such as the short lines that carry it for short distances, the risk assessment was made and some minimal amounts were put in place in the first year. These amounts are doubled into the second year, bearing in mind the risk assessment for the most likely of cases in the greatest percentage of times.

Of course, on some occasions that insurance might be exceeded, but in any event there would be a pooled fund that shippers would contribute to that would allow for additional coverage. Indeed, as I mentioned before, that would be backstopped by the consolidated revenue fund so that if more is required, it is paid, and then subsequent assessments could be made to ensure that it is there.

Therefore, it is a pretty good approach. Everything considered, I think stakeholders will be agreeable to that course of action.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my hon. colleague if he thinks it makes sense that the government believes we should wait 10 years before requiring new railcars of the latest standard—I think the DOT-117s—to be put into service.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the DOT-111 cars needed to be replaced, and the minister indicated some pretty stringent timelines, another set of timelines, having regard to the fact that the rail system is integrated. It is a North American system, integrated with the United States, and there has to be capacity to produce these cars. Witnesses who appeared in committee indicated the length of time it takes to produce new cars to replace the others. Those factors have to be taken into consideration when deciding on the timelines for the replacement of these cars.

Everything considered, the minister made the appropriate decision. Of course, there will be other factors that will need to be taken into account with respect to safety while these cars are being replaced.

[Denis Blanchette, NDP, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to get back to what the member said earlier in response to my first question. He spoke about insurance for small companies. However, a small company was involved in the incident in Lac-Mégantic, unfortunately. It is clear that what is currently in the bill would not be enough to cover another incident of that scope, which I certainly hope never happens.

Would the member be prepared to look at increasing the minimum amount of insurance in light of what we already know?

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, if the insurance is not adequate, the taxpayer ends up paying. The principle behind this bill is to ensure that the polluter pays.

There are minimum amounts of insurance that have been arrived at, taking risk into account and taking into account what is happening, but, in addition to that, there would be a pooled fund of $250 million to take care of any issues that go beyond the insurance. That would be backstopped by the consolidated revenue fund so that if the insurance comes up short, the consolidated revenue fund would cover it and the cost would be assessed back to those who should pay, which would be the rail haulers and the shippers.

That is the direction of this bill. It is taking the direction that those who pollute should pay, not the taxpayer. The bill does a fairly admirable job, and the member and all of his party should support it.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Before we resume debate, it is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, Aboriginal Affairs; the hon. member for Windsor West, The Environment.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Mississauga East—Cooksville.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege for me to speak today in support of Bill C-52, the safe and accountable rail act.

This bill is an essential milestone in the government's ongoing work to strengthen railway safety. I would like to use my time to demonstrate to this House all the hard work we have collectively accomplished with regard to railway safety.

In November 2013, the public accounts committee tabled its seventh report that contained an examination of railway safety oversight related issues. The report's five recommendations followed similar railway safety oversight themes that were outlined in the 2013 fall report of the Auditor General of Canada.

Similarly, the Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities completed an in-depth review of the Canadian regime for the safe transportation of dangerous goods and the role of safety management systems across all modes of transportation.

Before proceeding, I would like to thank the members of both committees for their thorough exploration of these issues, which serve to further enhance transportation safety for all Canadians. I would also like to thank the witnesses for participating and providing their invaluable knowledge and insight. These railway safety and transportation of dangerous goods studies and recommendations are important considerations to further enhancing the national transportation system. Let me assure the House that the safety of Canadians remains this government's biggest priority.

As such, it is important to review the many activities and measures that our government has taken to strengthen railway safety, transportation and movement of dangerous goods.

Following the tragic derailment in Lac-Mégantic in July 2013, our government took decisive action to ensure the safety and integrity of our railway system. The Minister of Transport directed Transport Canada to issue an emergency directive to railway companies. This included requiring a two-person minimum for locomotive crews on trains carrying dangerous goods. We also imposed stricter rules for securing unattended trains, and companies importing or transporting crude oil were also directed to conduct classification testing of that oil.

In January 2014, our government also launched a comprehensive review of the current liability and compensation regime for federally regulated railways. The goal was to ensure that a polluter pays and that there are resources available to compensate potential victims, pay for cleanup costs and ensure that taxpayers are protected. Input received from stakeholders during the review informed the development of the strengthened liability and compensation regime for federally regulated railways included in this bill, Bill C-52, the safe and accountable rail act. The regime includes enhanced insurance requirements for railways and a supplementary shipper-financed fund for incidents involving crude oil or other designated dangerous goods. In addition to addressing liability and compensation, we also introduced strengthened oversight and enforcement under the Railway Safety Act.

Additionally, to provide emergency planners and first responders with information to assess risks in their communities and to plan and train for emergencies, last fall we directed railway companies to share with municipalities and first responders data on dangerous goods being transported. I am happy to report that communities across Canada are now receiving this data from railway companies.

While Canada has one of the safest and most efficient railway systems in the world, we know that we can always do more and we are committed to restoring the public's confidence in our railway system. In addition to the actions I have already noted, we have taken further measures to enhance the safety of railway operations and the movement of dangerous goods, and we will continue to do so.

I can assure members that we are well advanced on implementing each recommendation the Transportation Safety Board has made. As I stated, our government is committed to restoring confidence in our railway system.

We will continue to work closely with stakeholders, including municipalities, provinces and officials in the Unites States to assess what more we can do to enhance safety.

In April 2014, our government announced measures to address initial recommendations from the Transportation Safety Board into the derailment in Lac-Mégantic. First, we ordered the immediate removal of the least safe tank cars from dangerous goods service. We also introduced new safety standards for DOT-111 tank cars and required those that do not meet these new standards to be phased out. I am pleased to say that the new safety standards for DOT-111 tank cars were published in the Canada Gazette, Part II, in July 2014. A detailed update was published on March 11, 2015, outlining the new specifications for the TC-117 tank cars that go beyond any requirements proposed for improved TC/DOT-111s. These improved tank cars would be the only option for newly built cars for the transportation of flammable liquids as soon as October 15, 2016. An aggressive phase-out program starts to remove legacy DOT-111s carrying crude oil two years from now and allows only fully retrofitted and TC-117 compliant tank cars 10 years from now.

On train speeds, we require railway companies to slow key trains transporting dangerous goods and introduce other improved operating procedures. For example, we are requiring railways that transport dangerous goods to permanently address route planning and risk analysis.

We also require emergency response assistance plans for tankers, including single tank cars carrying crude oil, gasoline, diesel, aviation fuel and ethanol. These plans have been reviewed and approved. As of September 20, 2014, there are now expert teams ready to respond to any petroleum spill, if needed. A task force has also been created to bring key groups like municipalities, first responders, railways and shippers together to strengthen the emergency response capacity across the country.

As members may recall, the Transportation Safety Board released its final report and recommendations regarding Lac-Mégantic in August 2014. The government officially responded on October 29, 2014.

First, the board recommended that Transport Canada require railway companies to put in place additional physical defences to prevent runaways. To this end, the Minister of Transport issued an additional emergency directive and ministerial order to implement significant changes to improve train securement and require railway companies to meet standardized brake requirements. The board's second recommendation emphasized the need for regular and thorough audits of railway safety management systems. In response, Transport Canada has revised its inspection and audit plans to allow for the increased frequency of safety management system audits, and allow for full audits to be completed on a three- to five-year cycle.

In addition to its two recommendations, the Transportation Safety Board also issued two safety advisories on mined gas and flammable liquid classification and on short-line railway employee training. These are being addressed as well.

Following the July 2013 Lac-Mégantic accident, we immediately required classification testing of crude oil. We also required emergency response assistance plans for specific flammable liquids and ethanol.

In July 2014, our government introduced a regulatory amendment that provides authority for our inspectors to conduct a more thorough verification of classification of dangerous goods. This amendment means that industry must now prove the results of its testing.

To wrap up, I will speak about employee training. We are requiring railways to submit training plans to the department for review. In 2015, the department will also carry out targeted audits to determine specific gaps in industry training plans. The results will help us determine what new or improved requirements are required for a strengthened training regime.

Our government remains committed to further strengthening railway safety for all Canadians. We will continue to take concrete action going forward.

I would like to ask all of my colleagues to support this bill and vote for it.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the speech from my colleague opposite. One of the things he talked about was the lowering of speeds for key trains, or trains carrying dangerous goods.

It has come to our attention that recently a number of disasters have taken place using even the newest models of railcars, and they have taken place at speeds significantly lower than the speed limit the minister has imposed. Does the member believe that the speeds the minister set are in fact safe for people in urban areas?

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member opposite for his question. I am not sure exactly what he is suggesting.

I guess the safest measure would be for the trains not to move and then we would not have any dangerous situations. However, in order to transport goods, the trains have to move, but lowering the speed would improve safety, which is one of the measures that has been taken. We have to look at all the factors that can cause accidents and look at all the factors to improve safety, which include speed, technical requirements and new requirements for tanker cars. All put together, this would greatly improve safety.

Even driving in a car at a very slow speed, one may get into an accident. Therefore, I think we have to be reasonable in how we look at this issue.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have had the opportunity to speak on the legislation in the past, as many members have. However, I would like to give recognition to the many railway workers. In Winnipeg, for example, there is the Symington Yard, CN yards in my neck of the woods, and CP tracks. These yards provide phenomenal employment opportunities and do incredible work in ensuring good safety levels. These are the people who are actually doing the job and making sure as much as possible that our rail lines are safe.

However, there is also a responsibility and a role for government to look at ways to improve the system, through technology and promotion of research and development, and encourage rail lines to do more on that front. I wonder if the member might comment on the corporate responsibility of using technology and research to continue to improve our rail lines, and that the national government, and to a certain degree other levels of government, have a role to play.

It is not just one thing: pass legislation and then our rail lines are safe. There are many different stakeholders who need to play a role in ensuring that our rail lines and trains are safe for communities in which they travel through.

[Wladyslaw Lizon, Conservative, Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am very passionate about technology, improvements, and the implementation of research and technology in the railway industry. My first degree after I graduated from high school was railway technician. I was an intern on a steam locomotive, and I know how far we have come.

There are technological innovations that can be implemented and used for railway safety, whether that be electronics or other devices, and some are used. I mean, we have a very advanced railway system in this country. However, there are new things that can be used that would not only enhance the safety but also make the work of those people the member mentioned much easier and more effective. I think that the corporations, railways, will and should implement these new technologies, new innovations and new inventions to the system to make it safer and better.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset, I want to mention that I was interested in the comment by my hon. friend from Mississauga East—Cooksville that when he was a student, he actually worked on steam engine trains. I look forward to hearing his interesting stories about growing up in Poland, where he had that experience as a young person in university at that time. I am sure he must have some interesting stories from that experience that perhaps we will hear in the House some time or that he and I might share on another occasion.

I am happy today to have a chance to participate in the third reading debate of Bill C-52 for a number of reasons. As the critic for the Liberal Party on natural resources, I recognize that the amendments to the Canada Transportation Act and the Rail Safety Act will have a profound impact in terms of shipping critical natural resources like oil, as has been discussed here today.

Unfortunately, my view is that this inept Conservative government, this Conservative regime, has completely bungled the Keystone XL project. It has bogged down the energy east pipeline project, and it should never have ignored environmental and aboriginal concerns and rubber-stamped, as it did, the northern gateway project.

The result of this ineptitude on behalf of the government in getting any pipeline project through has created a growing reliance on rail lines to get this valuable commodity to market, and hence, of course, related concerns about railway safety. These are concerns, I should add, that are in my view completely justified, given the government's track record on railway safety over the past decade.

I am also pleased to be able to speak today, because as a Nova Scotian, I am concerned about the future of the Cape Breton and Central Nova Scotia Railway, which has provided more than 135 years of rail service to Cape Breton Island. It has been very important for many industries in that area. In fact, in many ways, it made those businesses able to continue to succeed and employ people and provide benefits in their communities. It should be a concern to all of us when we see that rail line in deep trouble, because it is very much threatened today.

I know that the Minister of Transport, being a transplanted Cape Bretoner, is also concerned about the future of rail service to Cape Breton Island, as are my colleagues from Sydney—Victoria and Cape Breton—Canso. I know how critical CN Rail operations are for the Port of Halifax, my home city, when it comes to moving containers, and other goods as well, to destinations throughout North America.

Atlantic Canada has a long-standing and very deep appreciation for our national railways, which have connected us to the rest of Canada for over 100 years. Whether it is VIA Rail passenger service, which has unfortunately been curtailed significantly in recent years, or freight trains rumbling through Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, two beautiful provinces, of course, along with all the others, railways are a critical part of our economic infrastructure and are an economic lifeline for my region.

As an aside, I should note that I was happy recently to have the chance to take the VIA Rail train from Halifax, along with a number of MPs, to show our unwavering support for the continuation of strong passenger rail service from Atlantic Canada to Montreal. I am pleased that it appears that we succeeded and that the service will be maintained.

As the member of Parliament for Halifax West, I often get calls about CN's main line, which runs through my riding. It runs through Clayton Park, Rockingham, Birch Cove, and right through the heart of Bedford. In fact, I can hear the train whistle from my backyard and often hear the train rumbling by at different times of the day and night.

When I am canvassing in my riding, which I do regularly, I also hear concerns from constituents about issues like the fact that they do not always know what is being shipped through the community on those railway cars, and that can be of great concern. Perhaps they are worried about the state of the maintenance of the tracks and overpasses that are part of the system.

I had a recent example of a rail safety concern, raised by a constituent, regarding the maintenance of culverts and overpasses. When we think about rail safety, we normally think of what happened in Lac-Mégantic. We think of toxic or explosive materials being carried in railway cars. We do not think of something as simple as a culvert under a railway.

In fact, I had a call from a constituent about the fact that a culvert under the tracks in Bedford was getting clogged with debris and was causing flooding.

In my province of Nova Scotia, we had a rough winter, but we also have the experience normally of temperatures going up and down in the winter. It can be very mild one day and very cold the next. We can imagine that if a culvert backed up, there could be a substantial amount of ice developing on a railway. It is a pretty scary prospect in the middle of a community if there could be a derailment. That is something that was important to deal with. In fact, I worked with Canadian National Railway and with the City of Halifax to get the culverts cleared, which they were. It brought to light a conflict about who was responsible for the maintenance of culverts and overpasses and what impact they can have on rail safety. It is an aspect we would perhaps not think of normally.

Like all Liberal members in this place, I share Canadians' deep concern about rail safety in this country. My friend from Trinity—Spadina spoke earlier to Bill C-52, and he spoke eloquently about the issue of rail safety being paramount in his riding, which has some of the busiest tracks in Canada. He noted the ongoing challenge of trying to moderate the speed of trains in his community, something my hon. colleague from Mississauga East—Cooksville was talking about a few minutes ago, and of trying to get a handle on the dangerous goods that travel through some of the most densely populated areas of this country.

He said:

We also know the real safety solution for this is one that pushes the issue into another realm of debate. Solutions include shorter trains, more highly regulated chemicals in those trains, perhaps transporting the diesel and the highly volatile chemicals only in the new and improved rail cars, and until that happens much lower speed limits being imposed.

The member for Trinity—Spadina also commented on the fact that during the recent by-election in his riding, the New Democrats claimed that they did not support any pipelines in Canada and that their preference was to ship everything by rail. I heard earlier today my hon. colleague for York South—Weston suggest that the oil that is being transported by rail could not be transported by pipeline. That is the first I have ever heard that suggestion. As the critic in my party for natural resources, I have been hearing and reading a lot about this subject of oil and gas and so forth for quite a while now, so I would be curious to hear what kind of oil it is he is saying cannot be transported by pipeline.

They do not say to just establish a responsible situation in terms of pipelines, where we have rigorous reviews, proper environmental assessments, community involvement and support, and consultation with first nations and if it passes all that, okay.

We do need pipelines in this country, and we use lots of products that move through pipelines. The NDP's attitude seems to be no pipelines whatsoever under any circumstances.

Of course, then we have the Conservatives, who say that any pipeline in any circumstance is fine. It is an interesting dichotomy.

Let us get back to Bill C-52. This legislation is about two things: first, changing the way we establish minimum insurance levels for railway companies that are regulated by the federal government; second, creating a new compensation fund that would cover damages arising from railway accidents involving the transportation of certain kinds of dangerous goods.

Rail safety has, of course, become a profoundly important issue for Canadians since Lac-Mégantic, and the Conservative government has been slow to react. It has come out with a series of dribs and drabs and a slow release of technical and regulatory amendments in bills like Bill C-52.

The sad truth is that the government's attempts to improve rail safety are in part its reaction to the horrific train explosion at Lac-Mégantic, where so many innocent people lost their lives and so many families were touched by tragedy. I know every member in this House was saddened and horrified by happened in Lac-Mégantic.

This legislation is dubbed the safe and accountable rail act. It is always interesting the names the Conservatives come up with. I think they sometimes spend more time figuring out what attractive names to use for their bills than they do actually thinking about the contents of the legislation.

This bill would amend two other acts, the Canada Transportation Act and the Railway Safety Act. With respect to the Canada Transportation Act, Bill C-52 would strengthen the liability and compensation regime for federally regulated railway companies. It would do this by establishing minimum insurance levels for railway companies and a supplementary shipper finance compensation fund. This fund would cover damages resulting from railway accidents involving the transportation of certain dangerous goods.

Among other things, the amendments would establish minimum insurance levels for freight railway operations based on the type and volume of goods being transported. They would require the holder of a certificate of fitness to maintain liability insurance coverage as required by the act and to notify the Canadian Transportation Agency without delay if its insurance coverage was affected. Certainly that makes sense.

The amendments would establish that a railway company was liable, without proof of fault or negligence, subject to certain defences, for losses. There would be be absolute liability for losses, damages, costs, and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or other designated goods up to the level of the company's minimum liability insurance coverage. The amendments would also establish a compensation fund in the accounts of Canada, financed by levies on shippers, to cover the losses, damages, costs, and expenses resulting from a railway accident involving crude oil or designated goods that exceeded the minimum liability insurance coverage.

This bill would also amend the Railway Safety Act to, among other things, allow a province or municipality that incurred costs in responding to a fire that was the result of a railway company's operations to apply to the Canadian Transportation Agency to have those costs reimbursed by the railway company.

It would clarify the cabinet's power to make regulations regarding the restriction and prevention of access to land on which a line of railway was situated, including by means of fences or signs. In other words, it would make that area safer so that people would not go on the line and perhaps intentionally cause harm or be in a situation where they might be harmed themselves. It would also authorize a railway safety inspector who was satisfied that there was an immediate threat to the safety or security of railway operations to order a person or company to take any measures the inspector specified to mitigate the threat.

It would authorize the minister to require a company, road authority, or municipality to take corrective measures the minister specified were necessary for safe railway operations. It would provide the cabinet with regulation-making power regarding the submission of information that was relevant to the safety of railway operations. Finally, it would authorize the minister to order a company that was implementing its safety management system in a manner that risked compromising railway safety to take necessary corrective measures.

While Bill C-52 and other legislation address some of the measures the Liberal Party has been calling for in this area, in my view, they fall short of the Conservative government's promise to ensure the safety and integrity of Canada's railway system.

The facts speak for themselves. We saw three new derailments in February and March in Ontario alone.

Canadians have been duped with a piecemeal approach to rail safety. This latest bill is just the latest example of a government that still fails to take rail safety seriously. How else can we explain the fact that Transport Canada's rail safety division is understaffed, underfunded, and undertrained? It has been the victim of a revolving door of Conservative ministers, with five ministers in nine years.

Transport Canada is filled with very good public servants who are dedicated to ensuring the safety and integrity of our railway system. Make no mistake about that. However, it is too bad the government does not have the same level of integrity and commitment. As my colleague from Ottawa South, the Liberal Party transport critic, has noted in his comments on this bill, rail safety funding is down 20% over the last five years. During this period, when we have had so much more concern about rail safety, the Conservative government has cut funding for rail safety by 20%. How does that match the rhetoric from that side of the House?

Let me quote my hon. colleague from Ottawa South. He said:

What the Conservatives are doing by subterfuge, by stealth, by miscommunicating, by misleading Canadians, frankly, is they are trying to create an impression that they are on top of this profoundly important public safety issue called rail safety. They are not.

I wish the minister would listen to my hon. colleague from Ottawa South on this file, and listen to witnesses who appeared at committee to offer constructive criticism of Bill C-52. A number of key expert witnesses testified that they had never been properly consulted by the government regarding this legislation. At committee, they expressed profound questions about the insurance implications, distributive effects, employment implications, and trade competitiveness implications of this bill. Unfortunately, these concerns seemed to fall on deaf ears.

It is important to note that this comes at a time when Transport Canada has a lot of catching up to do since its budget was slashed by $202 million in the main estimates, which is 11%. These cuts follow a scathing Auditor General's report, which noted among other things that the government only performed 26% of planned audits. It did not audit VIA Rail at all, despite VIA carrying four million passengers per year. Would VIA Rail passengers, as many of us are—and I hope more Canadian will be—not like to know that at least someone once in a while audits to make sure that the required rail safety measures are in fact being followed? The fact that this is not happening with Transport Canada's audits is very disconcerting, but it is no wonder when the government is cutting the funds to do just that.

We need to recognize that there is a capacity deficit, and we need to ask what the government's real priorities are. Let us consider these two facts. On the one hand, the Conservative regime has budgeted $42 million for economic action plan advertising. Everyone has seen these wasteful ads and vanity videos. On the other hand, the funding for rail safety is $34 million. Here we have it: $42 million for partisan self-promotional advertising, and only $34 million for rail safety. How is that for priorities? This sadly indicates the misguided priorities of a failed government corrupted by 10 years in power.

My colleague from Ottawa South said that he asked the minister 10 times in committee why she cut Transport Canada's budget by 11%, and she denied the cuts every time he asked. However, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that those are the numbers. Therefore, it is clear that the Conservatives have made some very poor choices and have their priorities badly skewed.

The Conservatives' failure is amplified by the fact that the Auditor General's report also revealed that the government does not have enough inspectors and system auditors to carry out critical safety functions. That is extremely alarming: not enough inspectors and not enough system auditors. This is rail safety that we are talking about. It is ironic that at the same time as the government has failed to provide adequate resources to ensure we have the safest rail system in the world, its failed pipeline policies have resulted in more oil being shipped by rail, thus adding to the potential for serious accidents.

Let me wrap up by saying that Canada was unified by our national railway, and many of us in Atlantic Canada and across our great land continue to live near the same rail lines. Many of us live in communities that grew up around rail lines. It is the federal government's responsibility to ensure the safety of people who travel on rails, live adjacent to railway tracks, and operate trains.

Although this bill does not go nearly far enough to protect Canadians, it does at least contain measures that Liberals have been calling for. We appreciate that. The Liberal Party will continue to pressure the government to make a greater effort to ensure rail safety is its top priority.

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, a few members in the House today have mentioned SMS systems.

Do the Liberals believe that the current SMS systems are working? Do they realize that 15 years after the Liberal government brought in these SMS systems, in 1999, we are still trying to fix the glitches in the system? What would the member have to say to that?

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, we have grave concerns about the way the government is operating a variety of systems. I talked about what it has done in terms of real railway safety and the fact that it has cut funding. How can we have confidence in the government overseeing or regulating any system when it has cut the number of auditors and inspectors who are there to check whether these things are being run properly and in a safe manner? That is not happening. We should be very concerned about it.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I was dismayed that my hon. colleague from Halifax chose a bill that is primarily directed to liability in relation to rail safety to promote pipelines in his address. I certainly do not believe that pipelines carrying unprocessed bitumen to tide waters for refineries in other countries are in Canada's national interest.

It is also important to say that, as far as I know, the Green Party is the only party that opposes Keystone, energy east, Kinder Morgan, and Enbridge. I know he said that the NDP opposes all of them. I wish that were true, but I do not think that is the case at the moment.

Therefore, I want to give my hon. colleague an opportunity to perhaps rethink if that is the official position of the Liberal Party forever, regardless of the jobs that are lost. Unifor recently submitted evidence to the Kinder Morgan process about how many jobs are lost when raw bitumen has to be mixed with toxic diluent to even move through a pipeline, because it is a solid, to put it in a tanker to ship overseas for jobs elsewhere in refineries.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, what the member is suggesting is that this product should be moved by rail instead of pipeline. She is saying that she is opposed to pipelines, period, so let us move it by rail. She is maybe saying not to move it at all, to not have any petroleum products. The idea that we would move away from fossil fuels is appealing for people who are concerned about the environment, as we all should be, but that is not going to happen tomorrow.

If we go out to any major highway, we will find a lot of vehicles that are using petroleum products to operate. That is not likely to change in the next month or year. It may change over a longer period, but, for the time being, these products are important to our economy and we have to have ways of moving them.

However, we need to be very responsible in terms of how we assess pipelines, for example, and other natural resources projects. They have to be done in a responsible way, with rigorous environmental assessments and proper consultation with communities and first nations. That is very important. One does not just approve every one of them, the way that the government wants to do.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the candour from the leader of the Green Party. It is a crystal clear position in regard to pipelines, which is that there be no pipelines. The NDP is a little wishy-washy. It tries to give the impression that it might possibly, some day, potentially be open to some sort of a pipeline, if in fact it could ultimately be proven. That is the position it seems to take in the province of Alberta; elsewhere its position seems to be closer to the Green Party's position.

We need to recognize that the amount of export of crude oil is increasing dramatically in Canada, and all Canadians are concerned with ensuring we have a safe rail line system. It would be irresponsible of a party that wants to govern to rule out the potential contributions that pipelines could make in the transportation of a product that is very important to our lifestyle, our economy, and our social fabric. It would be irresponsible to rule out pipelines.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with my hon. colleague. What he said makes absolute sense. It would be irresponsible.

Let us do this in a responsible way. In fact, we have thousands and thousands of kilometres of pipelines across the country that are already transporting oil and natural gas. They provide an important service for our economy. It is important to recognize that these are things we use on daily basis.

Do we need to encourage other kinds of energy sources? Absolutely. Do we need to encourage renewables? Yes, and the government, in my view, is not doing nearly enough. It is not interested nearly enough in these issues.

Regarding the suggestion from my hon. colleague from British Columbia that government should decide where things are going to be refined or upgraded, I do not know if the Green Party has in mind that the government would own the refineries or upgraders, or what it has in mind. However, I do not see much economic basis for what she is talking about. I think its economic policy has to hold water, not just its environmental policy, which is also very important.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's comments. However, one of the things he talked about was this notion that somehow Bakken crude can be delivered in pipelines. It cannot, without the Reid vapour pressure of the materials being reduced significantly, which is an expensive process. They do not reduce the Reid vapour pressures unless they have to transport it in a pipeline because it is a big expense.

That is what I was referring to; it was Bakken crude. Bakken crude by itself has too high a Reid vapour pressure to be transported by any of the reputable pipeline companies, which is one of the reasons it is transported in rail cars.

That being said, the rail car system in this country is currently not safe enough for the transportation of these kinds of dangerous goods. The Reid vapour pressure and other parts of that Bakken crude are explosive, and the containers it is being shipped in are subject to being ruptured in even the smallest of collisions at slowest speeds. That is what we are hoping the current government will take some steps on, and to date it has not.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for that clarification. However, I think if he checks, he will find that even Bakken crude is not uniform. Crude from various wells, whether it is in the Bakken or elsewhere will have different properties in each case. It is variable.

The fact is that the vast majority of crude moving by rail, from what I have heard and read, certainly can be moved by pipeline. That is one of the reasons there is such a push for more pipelines. There may certainly be cases where that cannot happen and it has to go by rail, in which case we need to have a very safe system. That is why we are concerned about ensuring that the current government goes further and is more responsible in its attitude toward rail safety.

[Bruce Hyer, Green, Thunder Bay—Superior North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Halifax West has repeatedly used the word “responsible”. He has implied that the Greens are not being responsible by wanting to stop the expansion of growth of the tar sands and shipping unprocessed crude overseas. That is not the case.

However, speaking of responsibility, the real question is whether it is responsible on the part of the Liberal Party to have absolutely no plan to price carbon and to leave it up to the provinces to do it. Is that leadership? Is that the kind of leadership it promises after October 19?

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Mr. Speaker, first, I do not think my hon. colleague characterized accurately what I said whatsoever. I talked about the Green Party's plan suggesting that we should do all of the upgrading, refining, that the Government of Canada ought to dictate where that happens and how it happens. The party's idea is perhaps that it should own and nationalize that industry. I am not sure exactly what it has in mind, but that is what I was talking about. He suggested something entirely different. I think he should be clear about that, and I think he may recognize that. I see him grinning back there. I encourage him to be more accurate in terms of characterizing what I have said about that.

In terms of our policy on climate change, I would encourage him to look at the speech that my leader gave in Calgary a few months ago. I think we see many provinces going in that direction, and I think we have seen people across Canada starting more and more to adopt exactly that point of view.

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles.

The entire country was shaken when, on July 6, 2013, a freight train carrying Bakken formation crude oil rolled downhill and derailed. We watched footage of the explosion and the fire with our hearts in our mouths. We mourned, with the families, friends and communities, the 47 people confirmed and presumed dead. We wondered why there were more and more accidents on what was once the safest way to travel. We were shocked when we found out that in this case Maine and Atlantic Railway only carried $25 million in third party liability insurance, which is not nearly enough to cover the incredible magnitude of the resulting damage and loss of both life and property that night.

Currently, estimates of damages in Lac-Mégantic exceed $400 million, and the cost of rebuilding Lac-Mégantic to what it once was will be far higher. Taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup and rebuilding costs, and we cannot put a price on the tragic loss of 47 Canadians.

The rail system in our country has gone through decades of deregulation, underfunding, mismanagement and bad decision making under the present government and the previous government.

The bill does not go far enough to address many of our concerns. I support the bill, but we must do more. The tragic Lac-Mégantic derailment has shown us that our liability and compensation regime for rail must be strengthened. However, it is important to also address the fundamental problems that have led to a dramatic increase in rail accidents.

In 1999, the Liberal government amended the Railway Safety Act to accelerate deregulation, a policy continued by the subsequent federal governments. In 2001, direct federal oversight was replaced by safety management systems, which were drafted by the companies themselves. The federal government's role in rail safety changed profoundly.

Meanwhile during this time, we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of rail accidents. These accidents have had increasingly dangerous consequences in our communities. According to the Railway Association of Canada numbers, in 2009, only 500 cars a year were carrying highly flammable fossil fuel. In 2013, 160,000 cars carried flammable fossil fuel. By 2017, our rail system is expected to be transporting 33.9 million tonnes of fossil fuel per year. These numbers do not include other hazardous materials being transported through our communities.

There is absolutely no doubt that protecting the public is our core responsibility and improving liability and accountability measures is long overdue for our railways.

It is sad that it took the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic to get the government to be serious about that responsibility. We have had exponential growth in the transport of hazardous materials. We should have been working on increasing protections ages ago.

In 2013, 144 accidents involved dangerous goods, 7 of which resulted in dangerous goods being released. Many of us have heard of the three derailments in northern Ontario. These derailments happened in the space of less than a month, between February and March of this year. In two of these derailments, tank cars carrying crude oil burst into flames. In both of these incidents of fire, the tank cars involved were upgraded models of the DOT-111s.

The government ordered the phase-out of the DOT-111s over the span of a decade. The Transportation Safety Board, which investigates railway accidents, has flagged the length of the phase-out as a huge concern.

In fact, in February 2014, there was a derailment in my riding on Sewells Road and Reesor Road. According to police, the freight car was empty, and a CN Rail spokesperson confirmed that no dangerous goods were involved and no one was injured. We were very lucky.

My riding is criss-crossed by railway tracks and is home to CN's Toronto east rail yard. The Canadian National line, running near Steeles, transports oil and gas and other flammable materials every day. Most of the tracks run at street level, in many instances, a few metres from homes, from parks where children play or people bike and run.

I am speaking today because I am concerned about the carriage of volatile materials with inadequate regulations in such close proximity to where my community members, my neighbours live.

Aside from discussing liability after an accident, we need immediate measures so we can help prevent and mitigate disasters.

I am not the only one who feels that we need stronger measures for rail safety. On March 31, the mayor of Toronto and 17 councillors from across the municipality wrote to theMinister of Transport, asking that Transport Canada establish stronger protections for cities than the ones being implemented right now. A recent report by the Toronto Start found that dangerous goods were often transported through the heart of Toronto.

The city has a set of recommendations, and I am proud to stand with them and demand stronger enforcement of regulations, and the adoption of stronger regulations to keep Canadians safe, Torontonians safe and all Scarborough residents safe.

As I mentioned, the goods transported by our rail system have been increasingly dangerous and our rail safety regimes need an overhaul to keep people safe. This would also mean that we need adequate resources to implement this plan in Bill C-52 and to implement additional oversight and regulation called for by our communities.

However, the budget at Transport Canada was cut 11% this year, or by $202 million. The government spent $42 million on economic action plan advertisement last year, yet spent $33 million on rail safety. It is shameful. Year after year, Transport Canada has seen budget cuts.

How can the government talk of meaningful oversight without providing the resources to do so? Oversight clearly requires resources.

As for Bill C-52, essentially, it requires minimum insurance levels for railways transporting dangerous goods and establishes a disaster relief fund paid for by crude oil shippers to compensate victims of derailments, provinces and municipalities.

We are concerned that the minimum insurance levels established in this bill may not be sufficient. Insurance levels should be based on the threat to the public, not just on the type and volume of the goods being transported. Estimates of damages at Lac-Mégantic exceed $400 million, but these new rules do not appear to get us to that level for small companies.

The bill would also establish a pooled disaster relief fund that would be made available if the minimum insurance levels were insufficient. However, is the relief fund going to actually have enough money? That is the question that is on everybody's mind.

For the 200,000 barrels of oil transported daily, Transport Canada estimates that oil levies would contribute about $17 million annually to general revenues. This is a step forward, but there are certainly many outstanding concerns. We would need to have that levy in place for about 15 years before we could actually reach the $250 million level where it believes we would be able to respond to any level of crisis. I would again point to Lac-Mégantic. It cost $400 million for the damage done in that one accident alone. Therefore, this levy would certainly not be enough.

We also want to ensure that the fund being established sufficiently covers all disasters, including unlimited liability for the railway's negligence. The bill would ensure that municipalities and provinces would be better able to be reimbursed by the railway company for the cost of responding to a fire caused by their operations. However, we have a long way to go to ensure accidents are less likely.

We need to figure out how to protect the lives of people living in Canada. We need real plans to manage the risk created by the kinds of dangerous goods being transported through our communities. We need to ensure that the federal government maintains an active role in rail safety regimes. After those years when the Liberal government allowed self-regulation and we saw numerous increases in accidents and a decline in safety, we need to ensure there are independent inspectors and that companies are held accountable.

Finally, we need to continue the national conversation about how we are going to process oil, bitumen and other natural resources in our country. We have an opportunity here to do much more in Canada to create real rail safety, and passing this bill will not create a safe rail transport system. Canadians deserve real rail safety measures and safe rail systems. This bill is one step, but it just does not go far enough.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with many of the comments that were just made by my hon. friend from Scarborough—Rouge River, about rail safety and the minimum amount that is now in this legislation.

While, overall, I think everyone in the House sees the bill as an improvement, there is much more that needs to be done on rail safety, particularly, as other members have noted, now that we are moving unconventional forms of fossil fuels that represent very different kinds of threats. There is more to be learned about the quality of fossil fuels. Bitumen from the oil sands is, without diluent added to it, quite a benign material to transport, but bitumen will not move through a pipeline without adding toxic and more dangerous materials that are more flammable. As other colleagues have mentioned, Bakken crude from North Dakota is entirely different.

Does my friend have any comments around whether the municipalities along rail routes should be receiving warnings of the most toxic and dangerous materials?

[Rathika Sitsabaiesan, NDP, Scarborough—Rouge River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has agreed with much of what I have said. We need to ensure that our communities are kept safe. There are many measures possible, and we need to ensure that we do not put our residents in harm's way by not doing everything we can to ensure the transport of goods along our railways is safe. We need to work toward that.

[Laurin Liu, NDP, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-52.

Basically, this bill requires railway companies that transport dangerous goods to have a minimum amount of insurance coverage. It also establishes a disaster relief fund paid for by crude oil shippers to compensate victims of derailments, provinces and municipalities.

The measures contained in this bill are vital, and that is why I support them. However, the bill is not enough to ensure proper rail safety in Canada. The Government of Canada has been deregulating the rail industry for decades. It started under the Liberals' watch. They began making amendments to the Railway Safety Act as early as 1999 in order to hasten the deregulation of this industry.

I would also like to talk about my constituents' concerns regarding the transportation of dangerous goods. Last week, I went door to door with a team of volunteers in order to talk to my constituents about the environment and their concerns about environmental assessment.

We found that a great deal of deregulation has occurred in the rail industry. There has also been a lot of deregulation regarding pipelines and the associated environmental assessments. The Conservatives have seriously undermined Canadians' confidence in the federal pipeline assessment process by gutting the environmental rules and seriously limiting public consultation.

Obviously, the Conservative government is willing to deregulate at any cost in order to promote the industry, and it is our environment and our health that will suffer for it. In fact, Ottawa recently transferred the responsibility for determining whether a pipeline project would have an impact on fish and aquatic species at risk to the National Energy Board. The National Energy Board is responsible for monitoring the oil and gas industry, not the environment and aquatic species. The board does not have the necessary expertise to reassure Canadians that there will be a rigorous environmental assessment process.

Getting back to the subject of rail industry deregulation, in 1999 the Liberal government amended the Railway Safety Act. Successive governments maintained that policy. In 2001, when direct federal government oversight was replaced by safety management systems, the federal government's rail safety role changed dramatically. Nothing in this bill guarantees that rail companies will comply with the government's regulations.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Canadians deserve a government that will take action to prevent accidents and protect their health, their environment and their safety across the country. The federal government has so neglected railways in Canada that the transportation of dangerous goods by train has become extremely risky. That is why we need a national transportation strategy such as the one proposed by my former colleague from Trinity—Spadina, Olivia Chow. We need a strategy to ensure that dangerous goods can be transported safely with the infrastructure we have in Canada. That is why we put this proposal forward. I would like to conclude by saying that the government's approach has been a complete failure. The NDP has solutions that will really keep Canadians safe.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Resuming debate.

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

The question is on the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

I declare the motion carried.

(Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed)

I see the hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development rising on a point of order.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Fraser Canyon, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I wonder if we could get unanimous consent to see the clock at 5:30 p.m.

[The Acting Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.