Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is David Chudnovsky. I am the member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia for the constituency of Vancouver-Kensington, the best, the very finest of the 79 constituencies in British Columbia. I am also responsible, on behalf of the official opposition, for being the critic of the Minister of Transportation, and that begins my interest in this issue.
I want to begin by recalling that in August 2005 there was, as I'm sure you're aware, a disastrous spill into the Cheakamus River, which is in southwest British Columbia near the town of Squamish. As a result of that spill, the derailment of a CN train, I became very involved in this issue.
Before I go any further, Mr. Chair, I want to pay tribute to your clerk, Mark D'Amore, who was very helpful in getting us ready for this and making sure the brief was translated, etc. So thank you to Mark.
The reason I point to the spill in the Cheakamus Canyon, Chairperson, to begin with, is that I want to impress upon the committee that this is not simply a technical exercise. People in British Columbia are scared and have been scared for a couple of years. They're nervous. People who live in CN rail corridors have had enough derailments that it's something that folks think about all the time. You'll recall--and I'm sure you've looked at some of this stuff--that there was for a while, it seemed, a derailment every day or every couple of days.
I point you to appendix 1 in my submission. I won't go through it, but it is a timeline of derailments working backwards from now. It's only a couple of years' worth, and only in British Columbia, and there are pages and pages of them.
So the first thing I want to impress upon you is the seriousness with which the folks who live in British Columbia take this issue and the fear and nervousness they have with respect to CN.
I also want to say in introduction that I asked the Minister of Transportation, the Honourable Kevin Falcon, to accompany me here today to give whatever information he could provide to you together with me. He chose not to do that, but I encourage you to be in touch with the Honourable Kevin Falcon, the Minister of Transportation for British Columbia, who among other things was involved in the negotiation of the sale of the former B.C. Rail to CN. One of the questions I would encourage you to ask that minister, and I've asked him many times, is what discussions, if any, took place with CN, at the time of the privatization of B.C. Rail, about safety maintenance or environmental protection. What commitments, if any, were made?
I want to say I have set my mind and that of my colleagues to the question of what it is that has made the situation with CN in our province so peculiar over the last couple of years. Why is it there have been so many derailments and so many tragedies and near tragedies in British Columbia? I would suggest, Chair, there are two explanations for that, which we need to look at carefully.
First of all, I believe CN was not ready for the topography, the geography, and the environment of British Columbia when it took over the former B.C. Rail line. They thought they were just running a railway in the same way as they did in the rest of the country. But as we know, the topography and the geography of British Columbia are unique. The changes in elevation, the curves--the range of topography is such that it is unlike anything else that a major rail company faces in North America. So that's the first reason that I think we have seen for the problems we face in B.C.
The second reason is the fact that we moved from a crown corporation, a company that was owned and run by the people of the province of British Columbia, which, to some extent at least, was operating on the basis of providing a service and a return to the people of British Columbia. We moved from that to a very large international corporation that has a very different strategy and philosophy of running its operation. What arose from that were very specific choices they made, for instance, to move locomotives and rolling stock from the B.C. situation to the rest of the continent. This seems to have been a contributing factor to some of the problems we face.
I want to say parenthetically that I read the transcript of the submission to you last week by Mr. Gordon Rhodes, with whom we have been in touch over the last couple of years. I want to be clear that in every case--I read it carefully--the situations, the problems, the reductions in safety standards he described to you that are attributed to CN, we, in our office in B.C., have heard as well, from sources beyond Mr. Rhodes.
I would point out that in the brief--and I hope you'll have an opportunity to read it--we have itemized, among many, many of the situations that have been described to us by people in British Columbia, a number of changes that we focused on. The changes and practices chosen by CN after they took over from B.C. Rail are the areas we chose to focus on. Some of those you've heard a lot about in your deliberations: the length of trains, dynamic braking, and power at the centre of the trains. There are a number of others that you wouldn't have heard very much about, which I would encourage you to have a look at. They are on page 4; I don't have time to read them precisely.
The last point I want to make--and I hope there will be a chance to have questions and answers--is that the relationship between the company as employer and the workers as employees is one of the contributing factors to the problems we face. Appendix 2 at the end of my brief outlines some of the problems in terms of the employee relations used by CN.
Chairperson, I'll finish now by thanking one other person for helping to prepare the brief, and I hope people have a chance to look at it carefully. I will thank our researcher--whose time I get one-sixth of in the legislature in B.C.--Sarah Goldvine, who has done a tremendous amount of work over the last couple of years in preparing this material.
Thank you very much for your patience.