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?