Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I have some familiar faces with me today. Just to review, I have with me Luc Bourdon, the director general of rail safety at Transport Canada, and Madam Marie-France Dagenais, the director general of the transportation of dangerous goods directorate. With us today for the first time is Mr. Scott Kennedy, the acting director general of marine safety.
As you mentioned, we had our session on Monday. We talked about the safety management systems at Transport Canada. Today we'd like to give you a bit of an overview of the transportation of dangerous goods program.
The TDG program is governed by the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992, but despite the name of the act, it was actually updated in 2009. The TDG act is somewhat unique in Transport Canada, as it is, I believe, our sole piece of safety legislation that carries with it criminal penalties, i.e., contraventions of the act could result in jail terms. It applies to every Canadian who imports, handles, offers for transport, or transports dangerous goods.
The act focuses on public safety, prevention, and response. It looks at people, property, health, and the environment. It's a multimodal act, so it applies not just to one mode but to all modes: air, rail, marine, and road.
I'm following the deck here. I'm sorry. I should have mentioned that. I'm on page 3.
Right now, there are over 51.6 million commercially available chemicals, and the number of available chemicals continues to grow each year. With that growth, obviously we have to determine what the properties of those chemicals are so we can assure ourselves that they're going to be transported in the safest possible fashion.
There are probably about 30 million shipments of dangerous goods every year, and 99.998% of those shipments arrive without serious incident, but obviously it's the 0.002% that concerns us the most. That is the number we're trying to reduce on a continual basis.
As I mentioned, our foundation is the TDG act. It provides us with the authority to develop policy, verify compliance, conduct research to enhance safety and security, guide emergency response, and develop regulations and standards to manage risk and promote public safety while mitigating the consequences of an incident during the transportation of dangerous goods.
Our TDG program is based on the premise that properly classifying a dangerous good while ensuring the dangerous good is transported in the required means of containment, along with other safety measures such as emergency response assistance plans, or ERAPs, documentation, safety marks, reporting, and training, are all crucial elements in the safe transportation of dangerous goods.
With that brief introduction, Mr. Chair, I'll now ask our director general of dangerous goods, Madam Dagenais, to go into more detail on how the program works and how we apply it at Transport Canada.