Mr. Minister, I have a couple of areas I'd like to talk about. The first is railway safety. You made mention regarding the history--I guess the increasing history--of derailments and incidents that were finally responded to. You made reference and response to my colleague, Mr. Volpe, about this predating your time. I think you will acknowledge that the spike in railway derailments became very noticeable by the summer of 2005. A lot of that was with CN, which had taken over BC Rail in July of 2004. By the summer and fall of 2005, it became apparent that there was a significant spike. We'd had the Cheakamus River incident.
Minister Lapierre did order, in the fall of 2005, a safety audit and a safety management report to look into the causes of this. I recognize that you took action in December of 2006, I believe, with respect to appointing this panel and gave them until October. I'm concerned that in October of 2006 this committee had begun our motion, prior to your appointment of the panel. I had put forward a motion calling for this inquiry that we're currently undertaking. I just wanted to put the sequencing in to suggest that in fact the railway derailments really spiked--and that was across Canada, but particularly noticeably in British Columbia--after the takeover of BC Rail. The Liberal government did respond by both ordering the audit and placing orders, as you did. You ordered a section 32, and there were section 31 orders placed upon CN regarding the length of trains they could carry and the speed of the trains in British Columbia.
I'm curious as to why you felt a panel was needed on top of the work being done by this committee. Did you think our work wasn't going to be adequate?