Transport Committee on Sept. 19th, 2024

[Mario Péloquin]

Absolutely, the team at Siemens, the local team in Montreal, is helping us commission the new trains right now that we're receiving at a rate of one a month, and sometimes two. The team of engineers and so on in Sacramento is also supporting us every day.

With this incident, it's important to note that although we identified what the first cause of the mechanical failure was, we're working closely with Siemens to identify all the other aspects of the secondary cause that caused the locomotive engine to shut down, which caused the more significant delay afterwards.

I can tell you that they are working in collaboration with us, and they're helping us discover all the mechanical aspects of this failure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Ms. Koutrakis.

Mr. Barsalou‑Duval, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Witnesses, thank you for being here today. I think it was highly necessary to hear from you at the committee about a situation like the one experienced on the Labour Day weekend, which, as you mentioned, is unacceptable.

Like everyone else, I was shocked when I saw it on the news. I found it hard to believe that an incident like this could happen again. It seems to me that the situation that occurred in December 2022, where people were stuck on the train for long hours, was unacceptable. Now we see that the same thing has happened again.

I'm going to read you an excerpt from Via Rail's statement published on January 10, 2023. You said: “Beyond not having met the expectations of our customers, we have not lived up to our own standards … it is clear that lessons will be learned, and changes will be made.”

In December 2022, a train was stranded, there was no communication, the toilets were out of order and they ran out of food and water. A trip that was supposed to last three hours turned into a 14-hour journey.

In the September 2024 incident, a train was stranded, there was no communication, the toilets were out of order and they ran out of food and water. The train was stranded for about 10 hours.

It seems to me that nothing has changed. Can you explain that to us?

[Mario Péloquin]

These are two completely different situations. I will give you a bit of background.

The first situation was caused by an ice storm. Nearby roads, including Highway 401, were blocked or closed, so the arrival of emergency aid proved to be a bit more complicated compared to the situation in the summer of 2024. The train was stranded for a long time. A tree fell on it. A Canadian National train derailed. These were really very different circumstances from what we experienced a few weeks ago.

In this case, the train was stranded, but as Ms. Toporowski explained, the repairs were done in less than two hours and the train was able to start running again. At that time, we had no reason to believe that there would be another mechanical failure shortly afterward. As Ms. Toporowski also explained, the locomotive's engine cut out and the team began working to find the source of the mechanical breakdown and see what more could be done.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

I understand what you are saying. There is a difference between the two incidents, and I recognize that. In the case of the 2022 incident, a tree fell and there was a snowstorm. In 2024, however, the broken-down train was in an accessible location. In my opinion, it would have been possible to bring in supplies, allow people to get off the train to change their itinerary or even provide a bus to transport them to their destination. In spite of all that, they stayed on the train for 10 hours.

I understand that you could not have foreseen the second problem. As you say, there was a problem, you stopped the train for two hours and resolved the problem, but then another one arose. Many hours went by between the second problem and the time people arrived at the station. It wasn't initially supposed to take that long.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of regular people stuck in a metal box for hours on end, unable to go out, eat or use the washroom. Eventually they get quite distressed and demand accountability.

I feel that the lack of communication we saw in the 2022 incident happened again in 2024. From what we saw in the media, people felt powerless, in the dark and at a loss. I would not have liked to be in their shoes.

[Mario Péloquin]

I'm not sure that was a question.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

I'm actually trying to understand how you intend to improve your communications. Personally, I get the feeling that there is an obvious customer communication problem and that it is recurring.

[Mario Péloquin]

I will let Ms. Toporowski answer that question, but just before that, I want to clarify a few things.

In terms of the mechanical failures that I explained briefly, please note that the power was out only when the locomotive engine stopped running, and the outage lasted less than two hours. Since the washrooms and air conditioning system run on electricity, those services were out of order for 90 minutes. The rest of the time they were working.

Ms. Toporowski will address the issue of communications.

[Rita Toporowski]

I will add to what Mr. Péloquin just said.

The cases were different. Notwithstanding that, when the second mechanical issue happened, passengers were offered food throughout. We have emergency snacks on board the train the whole time. Until they were actually depleted, water was available the whole time, except for a short portion of time during which the power was out. Otherwise, water was offered as well.

Notwithstanding that, the length of the delay was completely unacceptable from the passenger perspective. You're right. Being stuck in something for that length of time increases the level of anxiety. The communication with the passengers was frequent. The issue was with the information that was actually being shared, which wasn't satisfactory in terms of where the solution was going to come from.

Even when the solution came to move the train backwards, to get it to an area that we deemed safe to start the rescue onto another train, that took about an hour. The transfer of passengers from one train to the next took about another hour, after which point they moved to Quebec City. There were chunks of time.

The failure from a pure communication...from what I see, is our ability to actually internally escalate to continue trying to solve the problem in one case, and then on the separate case asking what we can do creatively to get emergency services or somebody else involved to support this.

I think the escalation was what was missing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Ms. Toporowski. Thank you, Mr. Barsalou-Duval.

Next we have Mr. Bachrach.

The floor is yours. You have six minutes, sir.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you to the team from Via Rail for being here.

As I was listening to the responses and questions from my colleagues, I was just thinking about what it must have been like for those passengers on the train for 10 hours, not knowing what the outcome was going to be—an incredibly frustrating situation, to say the least, and probably scary for some of them. I appreciate that there's been an apology.

I also can understand why there might be frustration out there that this is the second incident in a short period of time. Passengers want the confidence that these problems are being worked out and that they can ride the train knowing that if something goes wrong, there's an effective plan in place. I look forward to hearing what that plan will be. I also appreciate the team from Via Rail reaching out and briefing me on the specific circumstances of train 622.

Now, Mr. Péloquin, in your remarks you mentioned immediate corrective measures. Of those, lots of them seem like things that were probably also taken after the 2022 incident—reviewing training requirements, revising communications protocols, examining what happened. Those are things that I would hope every company faced with a similar situation would do. The one that stands out as being somewhat different is the decision to evacuate if feasible.

Is this a significant departure from past protocols that Via Rail has had?

[Mario Péloquin]

I would start with saying I fully agree with you that the length of time the people were on board is unacceptable, and the entire executive and the board agree that this is the case. That's why we apologized: We didn't follow due process to make sure that we looked after our passengers in the correct way.

When I talked about the immediate actions that we've put in place already, some of them may sound like a repeat of 2022, but I can assure you that it's a step up from those things, because we learned from what happened on August 31. We looked at what we had done in 2022 and said, “What else can we do?” The evacuation process is new.

We put it in place immediately after, because, as Madam Toporowski explained, it's normal when you have a mechanical failure that a lot of people focus on trying to fix that and trying to bring the train to destination. We now have a new protocol in place so that before there's a length of time of delay, as soon as we have an unusual situation—a mechanical failure or other—we will convene the executives together and have a conversation about what happened and what we're finding out in real time, and will make a quick decision to evacuate the passengers if it looks like we cannot get them to destination in a reasonable period of time.

That's brand new. We've never done that before in such an organized way, and this is now the process that we have in place.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Was the feeling that if that protocol had been in place when this incident occurred, passengers could have been evacuated feasibly, given the proximity of the highway, as Mr. Berthold described?

[Mario Péloquin]

Yes. Thank you for that clarification question.

We would have taken steps if the communication protocol had worked properly. We would have made arrangements quicker. However, it's important to note that where the train was actually stopped was not a safe location to evacuate, because the railbed is elevated. There was a small forest. Although the highway wasn't very far, there was a forest, and we had a lot of people with different mobility abilities on the train. We needed to move the train to a safe location where we could do the evacuation—or the transfer, in the case of August 31—while keeping the passengers safe.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Péloquin, you mentioned that 10 hours is unacceptable. I think everyone around the table agrees with you on that. My question is, what would be an acceptable amount of time given that trains are going to break down? Via Rail operates over thousands of kilometres of track across the country. In the corridor between Toronto and Quebec City, if you were to manage people's expectations, what would be an acceptable or reasonable expectation for an incident response time on the corridor?

[Mario Péloquin]

Of course, every situation is going to be very different, so we can't really point at a number of minutes or hours. I'll give you a couple of examples. Typically, we handle situations very efficiently and the train continues on its journey to destination, and sometimes we evacuate people off trains. If there's a freight train derailment, for example, in front of our train, we'll take measures right away, because we know that it's going to take a long time to reopen the track.

It really depends on the situation. For some of them, we can see that within an hour, two hours or three hours the track will be passable again. In others, like in this case, we didn't know, and we should have done something different.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

I have only a few seconds left.

My last question is around the procurement of the new long-distance fleet. Given that this fleet operates in much more remote areas than the corridor across the country, will the design specifications provide for operation of the toilets and provision of water for extended periods well beyond what the Siemens fleet on the corridor currently allows for?

[Mario Péloquin]

Of course, the design of the new cars that we're going to buy for long distance is not completed at this point, and any lessons we learn from this event of course will be brought into the design of the new cars, working with manufacturers to make sure that on long-distance trains we will provide all the safety and comfort that people expect for a longer period of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Mr. Péloquin.

Thank you very much, Mr. Bachrach.

Before I turn it over to Mr. Lawrence, the interpreters have asked if you could kindly please speak more loudly into the microphones, just so they can hear and translate properly.

Thank you.

Mr. Lawrence, the floor is yours. You have five minutes, sir.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Péloquin, I know you to be an upfront, straightforward rail professional. I appreciate your contriteness here today.

I do have some tough questions, as I think the situation demands that I ask.

The first of them is this: Prior to this incident, when was the last time you talked to former minister Rodriguez?

[Mario Péloquin]

The last time I talked with former minister Rodriguez was shortly after he was named Minister of Transport last year.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

That was, I believe, in June or July 2023.

[Mario Péloquin]

From memory, it's July or August 2023.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

Thank you.

Have you ever discussed with former minister Rodriguez what happened in Cobourg, with the delay there and the protocols you've put in place to help prevent this in the future?

[Mario Péloquin]

I did not have conversations with the minister very often, but I do have regular conversations with the deputy minister and other officials at Transport Canada.