Transport Committee on May 6th, 2014

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you very much for being here today. What you had to share with us was very interesting.

I just want to ask a question because we've had previous witnesses in previous sessions, obviously. In hearing from the Teamsters and the workers of the railways, they said that often, one, they did not know what was in the cars; and two, if an accident happened, they would not know how to respond, that the training was virtually non-existent, etc.

Could you clarify that for me? That was something you talked about today. Is there training for the workers? How do they know what's in the cars?

I want very short answers because I have a number of other questions.

[Jim Bird]

Well, I can't speak exactly for railroad training.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Can you talk about first responders?

[Jim Bird]

First responders are something that, as I shared, for our distributors, we are working with to provide education. For example, we have a website, TDGER, and we—

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

You said that you have a first responder training program. Did you say that just a few minutes ago?

[Jim Bird]

No, I hadn't said that.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

No, okay.

Go ahead.

[Roger Larson]

I did.

I'm not familiar with the training that the railways provide to the Teamsters union. CN and CP can answer that.

We have a first responder training program that we've made available to every fire department in Canada where our products move. We go to the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs every year and do a presentation on our first responder training program. We are going to the annual meeting of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities at the end of May. We're going to again make our training programs available, try to increase awareness of the training programs.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

May I ask you, how aggressive is that training program? Do you have targets? For example, are you going to put 300 railway workers through it every year or every month, that sort of thing, or do you just offer it and it's sort of a laissez-faire, “people sign up whenever they want to” kind of situation?

[Roger Larson]

We don't directly train railway workers. The railways train their employees. We train first responders.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Exactly, but the first responders, are they all adequately trained? Can you sit here today and say that you have a targeted outreach program for them?

[Roger Larson]

We don't keep track. I'd have to ask the fire chiefs how many of their employees they've trained.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Right.

[Marty Cove]

If I might add just very briefly, we do have very specific outreach programs and targets that we try to achieve, but I can say with confidence that it's a massive marketplace. It's almost impossible with the resources that are available to cover everybody off adequately, so there are always gaps. People come to us—

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

We have also had the firefighters here and they have said that of course they have some training. I just want to know how aggressive or how proactive that training program is. Is it one of those, “Oh, yes, you can sign up for this thing,” or is it one of those things where each first responder must go through this training program? Is it a requirement?

[Marty Cove]

Again, it would be up to the fire chiefs, I guess, to determine how they require their employees to respond. We do offer the training. We do that often in conjunction with the railways, and it's very aggressive.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you very much.

That is very good to know, because they came here and they said they don't really have that. Knowing that you have a training program, perhaps it is up to this committee in some recommendations down the line for us to say that they need to all get this training. Is that correct?

[Fiona Cook]

It's the TransCAER program, which is referred to in some of the documentation.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Right, yes.

Now I was very impressed with your responsible care program. You have impressive statistics here. You've reduced discharges to water by 98%, reduced emissions of toxins targeted by the Canadian Environmental Protection Act by 89%, and substantially reduced emissions of air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides by 61%, and sulphur dioxide by 85%. Those are very impressive statistics.

In addition to that, most Canadians, I don't think, understand or recognize that the chemistry industry in Canada is so vast and has such a substantial impact on the Canadian economy.

So just for the record, I'm going to read it here. Your literature states that you are a $47-billion-a-year enterprise, and that you directly employ more than 87,000 Canadians and support another 435 Canadian jobs in other industries that are downstream industries, so that you are Canada's third-largest manufacturing exporter, shipping 30 billion dollars' worth of Canadian goods internationally every year.

Now my question to you is this. Given our expansion and work in trade, do you anticipate that to grow substantially or just a little bit?

[Fiona Cook]

We'd like to see it grow. We call ourselves an enabling industry. We feed into all different areas of the manufacturing sector in Canada—pulp and paper, mining, pharmaceuticals—so we are dependent on growth in those industries in Canada. But we also export a lot, about 80% of our production goes to the U.S., and the U.S. is undergoing a manufacturing renaissance right now so we hope to capture some of that growth, definitely.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

So, given some of the testimony—oh, are we out of time?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Hoang Mai]

Yes.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Okay. Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Hoang Mai]

Mr. Braid, you have five minutes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Larson, I wanted to start with a question for you, please.

As you know, Transport Canada has very strict requirements for companies to properly classify and label materials that are shipped, the transportation of dangerous goods. I wanted to ask if you could just elaborate on how your member companies are involved in this process or walk us through these steps.