Evidence of meeting #67 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was c-49.
A video is available from Parliament.
3 p.m.
NDP
Robert Aubin NDP Trois-Rivières, QC
This brings us back to what we were discussing earlier—the fact that the government's slowness leads to poor decisions being made. A good report was produced with good conclusions, but no measures have been taken to avoid the same thing happening again.
3 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
Indeed. We hope that the next responses we will receive from that department will be more detailed when it comes to what the department will do with regard to that study.
3 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Hi, I'm back.
To continue on with what we were talking about before on the lead locomotives—and this goes back to Mr. Jang—sometimes an engine is running long hood forward or another configuration where the lead engine is not looking forward the way you'd expect it to. Going back to what I asked in the first round, would you personally expect locomotives to be pointing both ways with the cameras front and back? Would the camera always be operating, or would it be manually set, or as soon as you put the reverser in, it's running? How do you see that?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Rail and Pipeline Investigations, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
In terms of the actual configuration in technology, that will be partly answered as part of the regulations. In terms of what we assessed for the configurations in our safety study, all of them had, first of all, a forward-facing camera as well as an inward-facing camera. In terms of the orientation of the locomotive, it was all forward facing.
Certainly to maximize information that's available, it's without question that a forward-facing locomotive with a forward-facing camera, inward-facing camera, would be the optimum set-up.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Right. Plenty of operations will not have a wye, and you'll have to run the engine backwards. You need to sometimes.
At the beginning, I talked about use of LVVR only on main lines; it's what we talked about from the beginning. What is your definition of the main line for this purpose? If you have an operation—like there's a railway in the northeastern U.S. that runs a whole track basically on rule 105. It's all very slow, basically yard limit rules. Would that company be required to have this, if it were in Canada, in your view? Is that a main line for your purposes?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Rail and Pipeline Investigations, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
First of all, main line is defined through regulations. In terms of applications within the U.S., certainly the intent is to have similar rules harmonized, but I guess I can't really speak specifically about the U.S. applications.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
With any company that operates without dispatching, which you can do if you're never going over yard limit speeds, it's still technically a main line but do you need the LVVRs? I'm sort of wondering. I think we've killed that one.
Another point is this. Do you have specific examples of where LVVR has actually helped an investigation? I think one of the best known ones is the Kismet investigation in 2006 when two BNSF trains collided. It's really a spectacular video, but was it important to the investigation or is it just a spectacular video?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Rail and Pipeline Investigations, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
In terms of the investigations where we've had access to LVVR, there are actually very few. But certainly as part of our investigations, and certainly recent ones, we've identified investigations in the past where it certainly would have helped. In a recently released investigation, we documented 14 occurrences where the operating crew perhaps misunderstood or misapplied some rules leading to inappropriate response to a signal. These we've added into that particular investigation, so definitely in each of those 14, that would have been useful information to have.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Understood.
Is there any move toward simplifying the signals themselves? If you look at a translation table for signals today, what they actually mean, you'll see that “limited to clear” has something like 15 different ways of configuration. Is there any move toward simplifying that?
3:05 p.m.
Director, Rail and Pipeline Investigations, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
I'm not aware of any specific review of that, along those lines.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Okay.
Is there any other high-priority item on your watch-list that you haven't seen?
3:05 p.m.
Chair, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board
We've talked about the foreign rail. There are several in air, one in marine, and then there are two multi-model, one of which we've talked about, which is the slow progress in addressing TSB recommendations by TC. But we're here specifically about the C-49 provisions for the LVVR, which is one of the 10 items on our current watch-list.
3:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Thank you, Mr. Graham.
Are there any further questions by any of the committee members? All right.
Thank you to our witnesses again. You provided valuable information as we complete this legislation.
We will suspend until 3:30. Then we will have the Canadian Transportation Agency before us.
3:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
We will reconvene meeting number 67 on Bill C-49. We have with us now in this next segment the Canadian Transportation Agency as well as the Honourable David Emerson.
It's nice to see you again, David.
We also have AGT Food and Ingredients.
I'll turn the floor over to whoever would like to go first.
Mr. Steiner, go right ahead. Thank you very much for coming this afternoon.
3:30 p.m.
Scott Streiner Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Transportation Agency
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the committee for the invitation to appear before you today.
The Canadian Transportation Agency is Canada's longest-standing independent and expert regulator and tribunal. Established in 1904 as the Board of Railway Commissioners, the CTA has evolved over the years in its responsibilities as Canada has evolved, its transportation system has evolved, and its economy and society have evolved.
Today the CTA has three primary mandates. The first is to help ensure that the national transportation system runs smoothly and efficiently. This includes dealing with rail shipper issues, rail noise and vibration complaints, and challenges to port and pilotage fees.
Our second core mandate is protecting the fundamental right of persons with disabilities to accessible transportation services.
Our third core mandate is providing consumer protection to air travellers.
Among the CTA's most important activities in recent years is the regulatory modernization initiative. Launched in May 2016, this initiative is a comprehensive review of all regulations the CTA administers to ensure they are up to date with business models, user expectations, and best practices in the regulatory field.
Over the next 10 minutes, I would like to speak about how Bill C-49 will affect the CTA's roles and how, if and when it is passed, we will implement those elements for which we will be responsible.
I would like to note that my observations are offered from the perspective of the arms-length organization that has primary responsibility for day-to-day administration of the Canada Transportation Act.
The Minister of Transport's principal source of public service policy advice is Transport Canada, and I would defer to the minister and his department with respect to questions regarding the policy intent of the bill's various sections.
I will structure my remarks around two key elements of Bill C-49: air passenger protection and mechanisms for addressing rail shipper matters.
Air travel is an integral part of modern life. Usually it's uneventful, but when something goes wrong, the experience can be frustrating and disruptive, in no small part because as individual passengers we have little control over events.
Bill C-49 mandates the CTA to make regulations establishing passengers' rights if their flights are delayed or cancelled, if they are denied boarding, if their bags are lost or damaged, if they are travelling with children or musical instruments, and if they experience tarmac delays of more than three hours. This is a significant change.
The current regime simply requires that each airline develop and apply a tariff: written terms and conditions of carriage. The CTA's role as it stands right now is to assess whether an airline has properly applied its tariff and whether the tariff's terms are reasonable.
We have said it's important that air passengers' rights be transparent, meaning that they can be found easily by travellers; clear, meaning that they are written in straightforward, non-legalistic language; fair, meaning that they provide for reasonable compensation and other measures if something goes wrong with the flight; and consistent, meaning that travellers facing similar circumstances are entitled to the same compensation and measures.
Last fall we launched public information efforts to help make travellers aware of the recourse available to them through the CTA if they have a flight issue that they are not able to resolve with an airline. We did so because we believe that for remedies created by Parliament to be meaningful, the intended beneficiaries have to know that those remedies exist.
The results of these efforts combined with the Minister of Transport's and media's focus on air travel issues have been dramatic. Between 2013-14 and 2015-16 the CTA typically received about 70 air traveller complaints per month. Over the last year, since we started our public information efforts, that number has risen to 400 complaints per month. And over the last week alone we have received 230 air traveller complaints. That is to say that in one week we have received one-third as many complaints as we used to receive in an entire year.
This jump suggests that the need for assistance has always existed and once Canadians knew that the CTA is here to help, they began turning to us in far greater numbers.
If and when Bill C-49 is passed the CTA will move quickly to develop air passenger rights regulations. Our goal will be to balance, on the one hand, the public's high level of interest in air travel issues and desire to shape the rules with, on the other hand, the expectation that those rules will be put into place quickly. To strike this balance we will hold focused, intensive consultations over a two to three-month period with industry, consumer rights associations, and the travelling public using both a dedicated website and in-person hearings across the country. Once in force, the new air passenger rights regulations will give Canadians travelling by air greater and long overdue clarity on their rights and what recourse is available to them.
Let me turn now to the second main component of Bill C-49: changes to the provisions dealing with relations between freight rail companies and shippers.
Facilitating these relations has been a key part of the CTA's mandate from the beginning. That reflects both the fundamental importance of the national freight rail system to Canada's prosperity, and the enduring concern among shippers about what they see as an equal bargaining power between them and the small number of railway companies on whom they depend to move their goods.
The CTA has observed that, notwithstanding these concerns, shippers make relatively limited use of the remedies available to them under the law. If this is because good-faith commercial negotiations are producing mutually satisfactory agreements across the board, that is excellent news. But if it is because the cost and effort involved in accessing the remedies are perceived to outweigh the likely benefits, or because of challenges with how these remedies are structured, the provisions in question may not be fully realizing their objectives.
We have also noted that there is relatively little information available about the performance of the freight rail system. This paucity of information affects the effective functioning of the market and evidence for decision-making, and stands in contrast to the situation south of the border.
The freight rail elements of Bill C-49 have the potential to address some of these issues. Amendments related to rate arbitrations, service level arbitrations, and level of service adjudications may help recalibrate the cost-benefit analysis that shippers make when considering whether to access recourse mechanisms. The the requirement that railway companies submit more data and that the CTA publish performance statistics online may help fill information gaps.
Perhaps the most significant rail-related change in Bill C-49 is the replacement of both the CTA's authority to set general interswitching limits beyond 30 kilometres and of the competitive line rate provisions with a new mechanism called long-haul interswitching. The CTA's role with respect to long-haul interswitching will be to order that the requested service be provided if an application is made and certain conditions are met, and to establish the rate for that service.
The bill gives the CTA 30 business days to receive pleadings from parties and to make these determinations. We've already begun to develop a process to ensure that we can meet that extremely tight timeline. We know that the parties will be watching our decisions on long-haul interswitching closely. Those decisions will be based on the criteria that Parliament ultimately adopts and on the CTA's analysis of facts before us, because as a quasi-judicial tribunal and regulator, what guides us is nothing more and nothing less than the law and the evidence.
Before concluding, I would like to mention one item that is not contained in Bill C-49: extension of the CTA's ability to initiate inquiries on its own motion.
The CTA already has this authority for international flights—and most recently used it to undertake an inquiry into some of Air Transat's tarmac delays. That case shows how relevant the authority—
3:40 p.m.
Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Transportation Agency
I've almost finished. Are we at 10 minutes, Madam Chair?
3:40 p.m.
Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Transportation Agency
I will conclude in the next minute.
3:40 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Judy Sgro
Could you possibly put that into your remarks to one of our colleagues, so we make sure that everybody gets sufficient time?