Transport Committee on March 9th, 2016

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Minister.

Do you also intend to collaborate with others, such as the Minister of Infrastructure, to look at investing in strategic locations, as you mentioned earlier, intermodal, multimodal locations, throughout the country? Do you see that as being part of your collaboration?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Absolutely. In fact, we speak on a regular basis. In the election, our government talked about social infrastructure, green infrastructure, and public transit infrastructure, but there's also trade-related infrastructure. The Minister of Infrastructure certainly recognizes the important dimension of transportation infrastructure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you, Minister.

Ms. Duncan.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you for being here, Mr. Minister. I appreciate your being here for two hours, as your colleague was earlier this week, and we had a great discussion with him.

I have been outspoken on rail safety. I'm delighted that the committee has agreed to take a look at it.

I have to say that I was pretty stunned to read the paper today to find out that Treasury Board is sending in a financial officer because of the mishandling or inadequate handling of financing for rail safety. I'm concerned that when I look in the main estimates the dollars for rail safety are being cut back again. This is a much bigger issue than the yo-yoing of funding for rail safety.

I met today with the fire chiefs. They are deeply concerned about the downloading to them of the costs and the need to train emergency and immediate responders. The mayor in my city is having to spend two of the three allotments to him for infrastructure on dealing with the impact of rail traffic in our city.

It's time that we had the federal government step up to the plate and start regulating and addressing the rail industry.

To that effect, I wonder if you could speak to whether or not you think it's time to finally move away from the self-regulation of this sector to the use of audits. When I came in as the chief of enforcement, we cleaned house. The field inspectors were delighted that they were finally treated as inspectors: trained, designated full-time inspectors, full-time investigators.

Will you consider doing a full enforcement compliance surveillance audit of this sector, and come forward with a clear strategy on ensuring that we have proper surveillance and enforcement of this sector, and well-funded, well-trained full-time inspectors and investigators?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

I thank you for your question, and I know that you are deeply committed to rail safety, as am I. I can assure you that it will remain my top priority.

Indeed, rail safety is very clearly spelled out in my mandate letter. After what happened in Lac-Mégantic I think it became clear to many people in this country that yes, rail carries dangerous goods and some of them go through people's backyards, and suddenly people became very concerned about the safety of the rail systems.

There is no question that the previous government put in place some measures, largely in response to Lac-Mégantic, such as how to immobilize a train in a safe manner, although I see we still have some work to do. There's the upgrading of tanker cars that carry dangerous materials. There are different measures that are more constraining with respect to liability and compensation to put more responsibility onto the railroads. Also there are changes in the rules. Yes, an important component of that is to ensure that we are adequately inspecting and ensuring that our rail companies are travelling this country safely and on safe rail systems.

Has enough been done? No. There is still more work to do. In the four short months that I've been in this portfolio, I have seen, for example, that in 2015 there were 737 train derailments. Most people do not hear about them. Many of those train derailments don't necessarily involve the train falling over on its side. Sometimes it just comes off the track and sometimes it's fairly minor and sometimes no dangerous goods are involved.

I think we can do better and you have brought up questions in question period about belt packs remotely controlling trains, the issue of fatigue, which we have brought up as well, and of course the recent example of a railcar in Regina travelling four kilometres through the town.

We're looking at all these things. In short, the answer to you is that we can do better. I believe we need to do better. It is a priority for me, and we are looking at different ways of doing it.

Thank you for your suggestion.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Minister. I'm not hearing an indication of a major shift, and you can be sure I'll pursue it. I know what rules and regulations are. I know what self-audit is, and it has to end in this sector.

I only have a few minutes left, I think. This is a huge portfolio. I wish I had more time but I do feel obligated to raise some concerns of the agriculture community.

I have met with organization after organization that are deeply concerned about the recommendations in the Emerson report. They would like a commitment from you that you are going to extend the deadlines under Bill C-30 which sunset in August 2016.

They are very deeply concerned about calls to end the MRE without additional protections in there for our grain producers. They also are very concerned about the proposed changes to interswitching. I know that's between you and the agriculture minister.

I would appreciate clarification on what kinds of measures are going to be taken to make sure that our agriculture producers can participate in the trade opportunities.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Getting back to the scenario, as a result of putting out the review...that's why I want to get the review out really quickly, so that people could comment. The comments that have been made to you have in fact been made to me and to the Minister of Agriculture.

We have not made a decision on whether or not to extend Bill C-30. It is certainly a bill that addresses some of the points that you're talking about, the MRE, the interswitching, those kinds of issues. We are studying this at the moment.

Remember that we've only had this report for a short time and we want to take the best possible approach to making sure that grain moves efficiently—it's an important resource—but in the larger picture, that we're also moving potash efficiently, that we're moving pulses, that we're moving coal, that we're moving all products including containers—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Minister, sorry to interrupt.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sikand.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you for being here, Minister.

I'm looking at an article—I'm not sure you saw this—in the Globe and Mail. The headline is, “Treasury Board to oversee Transport Canada's budget decisions”.

Accordingly, the government has placed Transport Canada under special oversight for repeatedly missing internal financial targets. I know there were some concerns with staffing. I can appreciate that you've inherited quite a precarious situation here. I just wanted to know how you're going to address it.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Thank you for your question. Yes, it's pretty well explained in the Globe and Mail article.

There's a difficult financial situation that is in my ballpark now that I'm the minister. I can tell you that I met with the President of the Treasury Board quite some time ago to discuss this, and I told him he had my 100% support, that we needed to address the issues that were raised.

It is important that our ministries are seen to be managing their finances as well as can be expected from a ministry of the government. I intend to work very co-operatively with Treasury Board in the coming year. My team is totally on board with that. We are addressing this issue and we want to make sure that at some point the person overseeing us from Treasury Board says it's fine, that everything is okay, and goes back to Treasury Board.

We have to demonstrate that we have our house in order. This is something that came largely from last year, but it's now something that I've inherited and I'm going to take care of it.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you for that.

I will just shift topics here to an issue more local to me. You've obviously heard of the Missing Link project.

The Canadian Urban Transit Association has stated that there is actually a shortfall of $18 billion for transit projects planned through 2020. I was just wondering what eligibility criteria would you suggest for public transit project funding for something like the Missing Link.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Public transit funding comes under our colleague, Minister Sohi's responsibility. Mine is more in the area of infrastructure related to transporting goods across the country. I hope you had the chance to ask him that question a couple of days ago, or whenever he appeared. That is clearly within his mandate, the public transit side. As you will not be surprised to know, there are quite a few interesting public transit projects that are looking for government money. We'll see how things develop, notably coming up in the next budget.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

I did ask him, but I thought I'd ask you too.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have two and a half minutes if you like, or would you like to share with your colleagues?

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Thank you, I'm good.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and Minister and your crew.

In the old days, the Department of Transport regulated the use of the radio spectrum and the performance of transmitting facilities. Is that still the case in your ministry?

[Jean-François Tremblay]

It's Industry Canada.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Okay, you just dodged a big one. That's fine. We'll move on.

I'm looking at the Transportation Safety Board active rail recommendations. There are a dozen of them. They are going back to 1991. The best mark that you're getting so far is satisfactory intent, but that's like, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are some significant things here that do relate to safety, that do relate to the monitoring of safety management systems, etc.

Do you see in your mandate letter an indication that addressing these dozen or so issues will be a priority for your ministry?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

They are a priority in the sense that when the Transportation Safety Board comes to us after investigating any form of accident, they make recommendations. Sometimes those recommendations are to Transport Canada.

We then have to make a decision, looking at the big picture, as to whether we are going to implement their recommendation immediately and as written, or whether we need some time to study it—some of these issues are extremely complex—or whether we will not. That is something we have to decide on and ultimately that we remain accountable to.

The status of the recommendations is public, and if we decide, then it is up to us to explain why we may not have implemented. The reasons are usually very complex; they're not straightforward.

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Are these published?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

That information is available, yes.

We can talk about some specific examples. I don't want to do that in this forum, but it is more complicated than meets the eye sometimes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Fraser, you have six minutes.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Through you, I'd also like to thank the honourable minister for taking a full two hours to be with us today. Minister, I think the level of access we have and the opportunity to question you is fantastic.

I'm from Nova Scotia, where everybody wants to know about roads. I noticed that in your mandate letter there is a requirement to promote different forms of transportation, including our road network, to ensure the efficient movement of goods. Can you describe to me either your work with the province that has taken place to date or your plan to work with the provinces to identify the key priorities they have to enhance the road networks across Canada?

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

In our initial meeting with all 10 transport ministers, including Minister Geoff MacLellan from Nova Scotia, they had the opportunity to tell us about some of the things that are important.

Where it fits ideally with us is with respect to transportation infrastructure; that's the area in which we're there to help. There are jurisdictions that are provincial, and some that are federal, and in some cases they overlap, but our ultimate aim, wherever it meshes with the provinces, is to help to move people and goods as efficiently as possible. That touches on roads, rails, ports, and airports. That's really where the mandate of Transport Canada lies.

There may be specific issues that are a priority for the province, and they let us know, and we certainly take those into consideration.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thanks very much.

I'd like to shift gears briefly towards marine safety.

The review of the Canada Transportation Act suggested that we need to, I think it was “strengthen and reform”, or language similar to that, the Canadian Coast Guard.

I've seen at least one shocking infrastructure project involving the Coast Guard, in Port Bickerton, Nova Scotia, where the project actually impeded the safety and the ability of the Coast Guard to do its work by clogging up the local wharf to the point that people can't even fuel up in the water. They actually have to take the boat aground to fuel up.

What measures are you going to take to enhance the safety and security of Canadians through promoting our Coast Guard's infrastructure?