Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, both of you, for attending today.
Like Mr. Julian and like Mr. Bell, who is normally at this table, I'm also from British Columbia, and we have suffered two major derailments in British Columbia in the last two years. One ended up with the loss of two lives, and the second resulted in significant environmental degradation and resultant loss of fish.
The safety issue I'm assuming we're going to address separately, and I understand that. I think the rest of the committee understands that. I do notice the bill provides for a new national transportation policy statement. That statement embraces not a new principle, but one that hadn't been addressed before, and that is the whole issue of protection of the environment. But we all know that policy is just policy; it's not a regulatory scheme. The policy is not an enforcement strategy. I'm wondering how you are going to parlay this policy statement into something that has teeth.
As a follow-up question, how do you see this policy actually impacting, if at all, in situations such as the one we had in British Columbia, where the environment suffered significant damage as a result of a derailment?