Hello, my name is Paul Gantous. I represent a small group of residents in Pointe St-Charles, which is in the centre-south district of Montreal. We live very close to the Alstom rail yards.
My brief is pretty much in line with and very similar to the briefs you've already heard. We have the same concerns. In our opinion, the amount of shunting noise that's going on—it's been going on the same amount of time, since 1998-99—in the neighbourhood, close to people's houses, especially at two, three, and four in the morning, has increased exponentially.
I won't repeat some of the points these gentlemen have made already. I'll just point out the three things that are of great concern to us. One, as has already been said, there's no qualification of noise regulation in Bill C-11, and we believe it should be tied to the World Health Organization's community noise guidelines. The numbers are in our brief, but I'll just quickly mention that at night there should be a decibel level of no more than 30 decibels within a bedroom, which corresponds to 45 decibels outside the house.
Something that concerns us in the language of Bill C-11 itself is in the proposed section 95.1 of the Canada Transportation Act. It's just one line, paragraph (b), which says “taking into account...(b) its operational requirements”, referring to the railway company's. We're worried that this can be used to override the intent of the law. If the intent of the law is to protect people from excessive noise in the middle of the night, but the railway company can just come back and say yes, but we have operational requirements, it's equivalent to a “notwithstanding” clause in relation to paragraph (a). We're worried about that and would like to see paragraph (a) take precedence over paragraph (b).
The other thing we're very concerned with is the carrying and the parking of toxic chemicals in these trains, toxic chemicals that are parked in our neighbourhood, toxic chemicals that are carried repeatedly through the heart of Montreal, through residential neighbourhoods that are very close to downtown. To look at the number of derailments, CN reported 70 in 2005, up from 49 derailments in 2004.
Just this past spring, I believe it was, there was a derailment on the Mercier Bridge going from Montreal to the South Shore. If these cars had been carrying toxic chemicals, could we have possibly been in a very dangerous situation? For anyone who lives in the neighbourhood, for anyone who happened to be passing through the neighbourhood.... Considering the proximity to downtown, the number of people this could affect would just be enormous. We're very concerned about that, let alone the fact that toxic chemicals are moving through Montreal when probably their destination is not within the city of Montreal—they could easily be routed around Montreal, but they're not—and that they're parked very often in Montreal, just sitting on the rails overnight.
What happens if there are kids playing around there? There are fences around these rail lines, but we've all been children; we've all hopped fences when we were kids. There are going to be kids getting near these cars, and the cars should not be parked anywhere that anyone can have access to them other than the rail employees. And they shouldn't be in populated centres.
Other than that, the conclusion is that we currently seem to be in a void of regulation in the train industry with respect to noise pollution. As has been said already, the municipalities and provinces are unable to apply their noise regulations where this industry is concerned.
We don't seek to remove the train industry; we seek to live in harmony with it, and we insist that we be able to coexist with them in a way that does not reduce the quality of life because of either noise pollution or fear of toxic chemicals being run through our neighbourhoods, and by an industry that seems to be running without control at this point in time.
Thank you.