Thank you very much, Monsieur Laframboise.
You are correct. We had to figure out what the state was, and we didn't want railways to tell us. We commissioned a specific study on the state of railway safety and asked someone who dealt with statistics to present us with those statistics. So I'm reasonably confident, despite the difficulties we referred to in other places in the report as to the reliability of the statistics, in what they tell us. Naturally we want to see the trends. It does appear that they went down in 2006, but unfortunately they're back up in 2007. That's a hard fact that we must deal with. That, I think, ties in with the whole issue of the collecting of statistics.
When you spend six months travelling across the country, there are things that really jump out at you. We were in Washington talking to the FRA, and they had the same statistics we had. Their statistical line went like this, but then it went sharply down about two years before us. I said to the individual, “What happened there? I'm interested in what caused that.” He said, “Well, we noticed that it was going like this, and we called a meeting to deal with it.” Their statistical line for derailments, either main line or non-main line, was going down.
That is why we say we want Transport Canada to be in a position to decide with the railways what statistics will work for them: to provide them with the information to come up with better solutions faster.