Thank you very much for that.
In the days post-Lac-Mégantic, after our visit, I can tell you that I did meet with the mayors in the area. I'm glad you brought it up, because the resilience of the communities.... Although they definitely felt what the effect was, they knew that they still wanted to have rail service through their communities; they wanted it to be as safe as possible.
The deputy and I, with officials, went to Montreal. We met with the mayors in the surrounding areas to hear from them.
That dialogue is extremely important. It's more than just talk. It's about getting on the table the real issues of the people. One issue we heard was their concern about knowing what's going through their communities. That indeed has been brought up a lot. We've been working with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' working group and we've been working with rail, with CN and CP, to get to an agreement for the parties in terms of what kind of disclosure will happen between the company and the municipality so that the first responders, so that the fire department, can have the information in a timely fashion and we don't have difficulties.
I anticipate and I fully expect that these two parties will have an agreement with respect to what makes sense in terms of information sharing. I hope we'll be able to talk about that in the coming days.
First and foremost, in terms of vision, you don't want this to happen again. You want to do everything you can as a government, and I think as a Parliament, to ensure that we have the many steps in place to make sure that we prevent this from happening.
There's another thing to note from Mégantic. It was an incredible loss of life, and it was also an economic loss to the community because of what happened with the devastation of the business community, but it was also an environmental loss. One of the realizations was the fact that the railway company did not carry sufficient insurance to cover off the liabilities.
That's why in the Speech from the Throne...and why I said in my speech earlier as well that we're going to require shippers and railways to carry additional insurance. First and foremost, you don't want an accident to happen, but if something, God forbid, does happen, you want to make sure there's enough accountability there for it.
That's in a broad sense, I guess, the best way to put the big issues.