Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee members.
My name is Robert Taylor, and I'm the AVP for North American advocacy at CP. We operate a 22,000-kilometre network throughout Canada and the United States. In 2014, we moved over 2.7 million carloads of traffic.
I am proud to say that CP is the safest railway in North America. We have achieved the lowest frequency of train accidents in each of the last eight years. In 2014, we had 1.2 train accidents for every million train miles. Our performance in 2014 was a 30% improvement over the previous year, which is a new record.
Rail safety is critically important, as is modernizing the liability and insurance regime for Canada. Our journey is not yet complete, but continuous improvement in safety is evident.
It’s important to recognize that North America's rail network moves 99.998% of hazardous materials, including crude, without incident. Because even one accident is one too many, we are continuously working to eliminate the last 0.002% of risk from our operations. We can safely and securely move dangerous goods.
Now I will talk about the bill.
We support the intent of Bill C-52, which is to better define and make accountable all those involved in the production, manufacture, transportation, and distribution of dangerous goods. We need to strengthen the safety and security of the rail supply chain so we can maintain a world-class transportation system, one that is accountable and responsive and works to prevent incidents from occurring as well as to provide compensation and liability in the event of an incident.
Several elements of this bill are items that CP has been calling for over the last number of years, and we welcome action. We do think, however, that in a few important areas the bill lacks policy clarity, and we urge the committee to consider this as you perform your review of this bill. The most important of these are as follows.
One, in proposed section 152.7, is the wording “involved in a railway accident”, especially in instances where traffic is interchanged or passed between railways. The second is proposed section 152.9, which references other acts that could negate the railways strict liability cap. The third is how how the shipper fund is to be recapitalized if depleted. Fourth, we also question why the shipper fund is only initially capitalized to $250 million while the railway has a strict liability of $1 billion.
These are important items that need to be clarified in your consideration of this bill.
Thank you.