Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My thanks to both of you for attending today. My question is going to be directed mostly to Mr. Mongeau.
You've done a wonderful job of defending your record as a company, but I believe it was Mr. Mackay who said the rail business is a complicated business. When you have a complicated business, you also need sophisticated ways of dealing with the concerns of residents, with government authorities, and with municipalities. Unfortunately, I think you're in a position where you haven't yet convinced Canadians. In fact, I think Canadians may have lost confidence in your ability to respond in a way that's accountable.
I can only relate to you my own experience, coming from the west coast. We have now had a number of very serious derailments, one of which caused serious environmental degradation and another one of which ended up in the loss of two human lives. Obviously none of us ever wants to see that happen again.
If it was only the safety issue and it was being addressed adequately, I think most Canadians would understand that there are hazards in any kind of transportation. But I look first of all at noise complaints. We had ordinary Canadian residents before us a couple of meetings ago, and we had municipalities in front of us. The general consensus was that the way the railway companies are responding to noise complaints is just not adequate.
The consultation process and the dispute resolution process haven't worked for them. We heard this from residents of New Westminster, of the city of Richmond. We heard this from mayors from British Columbia and from Quebec. That concerns me.
And then we move over to the whole issue of the net book value discussion that we just had. I know CN wasn't involved in the West Coast Express issue, but the general public's understanding of that—and certainly the provincial government's understanding and the local government's understanding—was that CP held the public up for ransom in order to get commuter rail in. Again, it's just a black mark on the industry.
Of course, we then get to the whole safety issue. What puzzles me with respect to CN was that we had these two serious derailments in British Columbia, we had one in Alberta as well, and the minister took a number of actions. He asked you to take corrective action. There was monitoring, direct enforcement, and a series of targeted inspections that took place. And then it all culminated on July 24, when the minister issued a ministerial order that CN had to take the necessary corrective measures to address the deficiencies.
Had that been addressed immediately, I suppose we could say there was at least some good faith there. In fact, the action that CN took was to appeal the minister's order. So you can understand how the public reacts to that and how we, as a committee, would react to that.
To your credit, you submitted an action plan on, I believe, August 14, and it is with the minister right now. I'm assuming you're going to follow through on that action plan. But the point I'm making is that the industry needs to have its credibility restored.
My experience with local government for fourteen years, and now at this level of government, is that typically regulation only happens as a response to some level of non-compliance with publicly accepted norms and behaviour. This bill is presumably a response to a lack of conformity to what the public generally and government in particular expect of corporate citizens.
I would ask you to respond. You're in the hot seat. You knew this was coming. There's a motion that may be coming forward later today requesting an in-depth inquiry into safety, and it does focus on CN in particular. Anything you can do to provide this committee with some confidence that we're moving in the right direction on all of those issues....