Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am pleased to be here to talk about this totally unacceptable situation. Passengers were stranded on a Via Rail train for nearly 10 hours when they were only 45 minutes from Quebec City and barely a few minutes from Laurier‑Station, a village located in the future riding of Mégantic‑L'Érable‑Lotbinière. They were right next to it. I can guarantee that there was a way to help people get off the train and to their destination. I think it is important to be here to shed light on this situation.
Let me explain to everyone what happened. Passengers were kept in the dark and received little explanation from Via Rail throughout this awful experience. I'm going to read a few quotes from passengers who were on the stalled trains.
One passenger said:
We haven't had food since nine o'clock this morning. It's now 6:30, and people are getting impatient. What was a minor problem is now becoming a major incident.
Carmel Tanaka said:
Staff will not let us disembark, even though we are next to a highway! The toilets don't flush when they turn off the power, the air conditioning fluctuates from hot to cold, the car is filled with burning rubber scent, and there are now no snacks left on board.
Another article states that some passengers had panic attacks or were in tears. People had to call 911, and people with health issues had to be evacuated. It is unacceptable to go through this in 2024, and even more so when you consider the government's history of chaos in the passenger transportation industry. It should not have happened, especially given what occurred in 2022. As my colleague Philip Lawrence said, in 2022, passengers were stuck on a train for 18 hours. That happened in Cobourg, Ontario. What did the government learn from that incident? Absolutely nothing.
Also in 2022, there was chaos at the airports, as everybody remembers. For hours, passengers were stuck at Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau airports. This is unacceptable.
Two years later, a similar event happens in Quebec, on a Via Rail train, and it seems that there was no plan to help passengers. This is an unacceptable situation. The government has dropped the ball.
In my opinion, we need to support my colleague Mr. Lawrence's original motion. I agree that we should listen to the passengers' accounts; they have a lot to say. I think this is a logical and reasonable addition. We need to listen to what they have to say. The government must listen to reason once and for all and understand that it has a role to play in this situation. We cannot ignore what happened in the past and pretend this is the first time. We must condemn the attitude of the federal government, which failed to adopt measures after the chaos of 2022. That is why I think it is important to keep the second part of the motion, which states that the committee condemns the federal government's inability to sustain reliable passenger transportation systems, as demonstrated by the events that occurred in the winter and Christmas of 2022.
For all these reasons, I am pleased to see that the committee is moving in the right direction. We want to hear from the Minister of Transport, the Department of Transport, the CEO of Via Rail and the passengers. However, it cannot be treated as an isolated incident. It is not an isolated incident; it is the result of nine years of inaction by the Liberal government on passenger transportation. We must condemn this attitude.