Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will move that amendment. Given the hour, I won't take a lot of time to speak to it. However, it's very clear from all the testimony we've had over the course of this fall that those who live in urban areas are very concerned about the noise aspect. I think it's fair to say as well that they have tried to work with the railways, as we heard from Mr. Allen and Mr. Wright from New Westminster. They've tried to work with the railways and they've tried to have elements in place that would preclude the kinds of activities that create a lot of noise in urban areas, such as decoupling, coupling, and shunting.
The railways know. They've made commitments to try not to do shunting, coupling, and decoupling in the middle of the night, but they haven't kept to the commitments that they made, so the problem here is the choice we've faced all along: there's the issue of activity and there's the issue of decibel levels.
Ms. Borges has quite rightly pointed out that putting decibel levels into the legislation may not be appropriate. We know that whether or not the agency develops regulation around the types of equipment that can be used, inevitably we're talking about years before the railway companies would actually incorporate that new technology, so the only real opportunity for us to provide some immediate relief to those high-density urban residential areas located adjacent to shunting yards is to ensure that we have some restriction on activity.
That's what's proposed here--that we provide some restriction on activity in high-density urban environments. In the case of greater Vancouver, for example, it would mean there would be more activity in the Port Mann shunting yards and less activity in the Westminster Quay shunting yards.
Now, one might agree or disagree with the actual time allocated here, or agree or disagree with whether 300 metres or 100 metres is reasonable--those could be subject to amendment--but the principle is to restrict some activity. The railways already have implicitly acknowledged that it is a problem by making these agreements to not do these activities in the middle of the night. That's the objective of the amendment--to not have people wakened up at 11 p.m. or 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. by shunting or coupling or decoupling, or by the idling of diesel engines.
I'd like the committee to look at subamendments if they're concerned about the particular time period envisaged or what the distance should be. The principle of restricting those activities is sound, and it would help those high-density urban areas that are subject to a lot of noise right now at night. We can't expect that the agency, over the long term, would be able to deal with each of these individually; we know that inevitably it would be a restriction on activity. That's why I'm proposing this amendment.
