Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, all three of you, for attending today. Your information will be very helpful as we continue to develop policy in this area.
I'd like to address a couple of questions to Messieurs Gauthier and Chouinard.
In your brief you covered a whole gamut of issues: hazardous materials, blocking of rail crossings, maintenance, safety, pollution, diesel pollution, etc., and also the issue of noise. I'd like to focus a bit on the noise, because it's one of the things that are covered by this bill.
You suggest in your brief that we should be fully enforcing the WHO's standards for noise--being 45 decibels during the night and 55 decibels during the day. However, later, on page 6, where you deal with some of your conclusions, you refer to the fact that you'd like to see municipal and provincial regulations enforced and that there's no reason why the railway industry should not be subject to them.
As you know, across Canada we have a patchwork of noise bylaws and nuisance bylaws. Every municipality has its own bylaws, and they're typically unique to that municipality.
In fact, we had a number of representatives from the city of New Westminster before us a number of weeks ago, and Mr. Julian may want to correct me, but as I remember.... Well, there were different noise bylaws, but there was an exception for construction noise from six in the morning to eight in the evening, which is probably inconsistent with the World Health Organization standards, especially when you're dealing with construction, piledriving, and machinery.
I'm wondering, first of all, what would you suggest be done to harmonize federal regulations--if in fact we propose federal regulations--with municipal bylaws and regulations?