Transport Committee on May 6th, 2014

[Fiona Cook]

Yes, we have committees called leadership groups. We have something called a share committee, which looks at health and safety within the workplace. That's the whole point of those committees, to get around and have round table discussions of what companies have learned and what they're doing, what they're striving for.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

I just wanted to touch very briefly on the liability question. I know it's been talked about several times here. My sense is that in your opening statements it was said that you feel you shouldn't share in third-party liability. Yet, to some degree, as the questions have gone this morning I get more of a read on it that you actually feel you already are, and you'd actually like to see that pulled out and separated and clearly distinguished as going to some kind of pool or fund.

Maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but my read over the questioning period has become slowly that your associations would be much more inclined to say that you'll share in that, but you already believe that money is being put forward by you. You just want to make sure it's put on a clearly defined pool that this is actually what it's going to. Would that be a fair assessment, Mr. Larson and Ms. Cook?

[Roger Larson]

Yes, I think that would be a fair assessment in a market-based rate negotiation between the railway and their customer, where rates are commercially established. I'm probably having trouble figuring out how—but you're the government and I'm not—the government is going to create that allocation. Yes, that would be our view.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

So you're not afraid of doing the allocation; you just don't want an additional fee. You feel that you're already paying an additional insurance, so to speak, and you just don't want another additional fee.

[Roger Larson]

I would be hesitant to say that any further increases are going to be passed on to our customers, the farmers in Canada, but the reality is that if our member companies' costs are increased, somehow that's going to have an impact on our marketplace and our customers as well, yes.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Very good.

I also want to touch quickly on the transload facilities. Do you have any interactions with municipalities, and especially municipal governments, as to the location of those transload facilities?

Are you also talking to them as far as development goes? I have a chemical company in my riding, and I know that one of the concerns they have right now is that there's talk about moving a residential neighbourhood very close to the location where they've been for almost 100 years now. They were intentionally away from everybody, and now people want to move to them. Are you having any dialogue with municipalities and really encouraging them to look at their zoning as far as these types of facilities go?

[Fiona Cook]

There are a number of cases, particularly in Ontario at the moment, where we are trying to get municipalities to recognize the existing buffer zones, as we call them.

[Marty Cove]

Maybe I'll add to that. I can tell you that our oil transload facility is in a town called Bruderheim, which is north and east of Edmonton. I've been at some of the community consultation outreach programs, and they are very well attended. We are very open with exactly what we're doing and how we're doing it. We're seeking feedback not only from the community as a whole, but also obviously from the representatives of the townships or the municipalities.

[Jim Bird]

I would say the short answer to that question is yes. There's a lot of interaction with the first responders, the fire chiefs, and also with the municipalities, those that have the code. Yes, we need to look at how response is going to happen. We need to consider the impact. We have to consider all the environmental aspects of things that could possibly go wrong, so the short answer is yes. There's a lot.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Hoang Mai]

Thank you very much, Mr. Toet.

Mr. Sullivan.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

We started to get into a discussion earlier of risk assessments when you are deciding what route to use and how. The rail industry has had an explosive increase, to use a bad term, in the amount of dangerous goods it ships, now that crude oil has been reclassified as a dangerous good. CP suggested that they used to move 300 carloads annually and they now move 2.7 million.

If that kind of an increase were to happen in any of the shipments of dangerous goods that you folks make, how would you conduct a risk assessment? What would you do? How would you create safety if you went from 300 carloads of chlorine a year to 2.7 million carloads by train? What would you do?

[Fiona Cook]

We would continue to do what we're doing at the moment, but obviously those efforts would be focused on where they'd be needed, depending on where those shipments were going. We already have the structure in place to deal with the communities and to make sure there's a first-response capacity there, and also that we make sure our providers are verified to carry those products and have the safest way of carrying those products.

It would be responsible care, but again, perhaps focused on those products that had significant volumes. I'd love to see those increases in our sector.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Yes, I bet you would.

[Marty Cove]

Would you like me to answer a little bit on that?

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Sure.

[Marty Cove]

I don't have a Canadian example, but I do have a U.S. example. Canexus moved some chlorine into a storage facility in Washington state for a period of time. Before we did that, we undertook extensive consultation, not only with the community—I think Mr. Watson was asking about it before—but also, we went through an extensive regulatory approval process, so we dealt with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, and OSEA. There was a huge number of regulatory bodies that we went through to do that.

That's a small example, but I hope it helps answer your question a little better.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

But the regulators had a big part to play in how that was done, in how that risk was managed.

[Marty Cove]

It's not just the regulators who have their existing regulations, but it's also the consultation process with the community. We had three separate consultation processes with the community where we were describing what chlorine is, its properties, and we were working very closely with emergency responders—ambulance, fire, police—to make sure that they were very aware of what we were doing and knew how to respond to those incidents if one should ever occur. Obviously, our goal was that it would never occur.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

When you provide ERAPs to communities through which your product travels—that's sort of a road map of what to do in the event of a spill—do you provide human or other resources in the event of a spill?

[Marty Cove]

We don't provide ERAPs to the community. We provide that to Transport Canada.

We do supply education, training, and in the event of an incident, in the unlikely event of an incident, we have a technical adviser who is available immediately by phone. Then we have our own emergency response team that we would mobilize and put into place should the incident be severe enough.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

You mentioned Mississauga. I lived through it and was one of those who was evacuated. I actually saw it take place from my window.

It changed the way dangerous goods are transported in Canada. It's no longer permitted.... For a long time it was not permitted to travel at more than 15 miles per hour in residential areas with dangerous goods on board. That has changed and we're now up to 40 miles per hour, but it also changed the way cars are stacked, if you will. You're not allowed to run chlorine next to propane, for example.

What other lessons are you using that were learned from that? What lessons can we apply to the Lac-Mégantic experience going forward?

[Fiona Cook]

Again, coming back to one of the key tenets of responsible care, it's community awareness. Obviously at that time there were no systems in place to have advised the community of what to do in the event of an incident.

We hope, perhaps, with the Lac-Mégantic tragedy as well, that the shippers or receivers of those products involved in that incident would be building that kind of awareness around what to do in the event of an incident, and again, hopefully, the unlikely event of an incident.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

One of the things we're studying here is how we transport this stuff safely if we're going from 300 carloads to 2.7 million carloads. How do we do it in a manner in which the public feels safe, the liability is managed? One of the things you're always talking about is that you don't want to have to pay for their liability, and they don't want to have to pay for your liability.

Do you have any recommendations for how we go forward safely, with regard to the transportation of dangerous goods, in particular, through large, dense communities?

[Roger Larson]

I don't have any advice on what you need to do with regard to the petroleum and oil industry.

If you look at what we did in Mississauga, it was: better tank cars, better first responder training, strong mutual aid agreements between companies to enhance emergency response, working very closely with the railways as they deliver their first response, better capacity. There were a whole host of measures in addition to the yard procedures and the number of cars, where you put them on the train, which you've already mentioned.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Hoang Mai]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Young, you have five minutes.