All right. Thank you very much.
The most important multimodal principles that should be made available within Canada are whistle-blowing protections enshrined in law, such as those that exist in the U.S., with an independent office established for these protections. The highest level of safety benchmarking should be required and written into transport safety law regulation guidelines and policies.
Today we look back with some of the same recommendations. On the transportation of dangerous goods, railways have made virtually zero progress in implementing alternate routes for the transportation of dangerous goods around heavily populated areas, as recommended by the Transportation Safety Board. Transport Canada needs to be more forceful in mandating company progress—for example, via interchange agreements—on rerouting, to reduce the risk of major accidents.
Since 2015 there have been seven major derailments of trains carrying dangerous goods. All occurred because of broken rails or other track infrastructure problems. The TSB March 2020 advisory noted that in key train and key route rules, there were “no provisions...to address the need for enhanced track standards for key routes”, despite the huge increase in dangerous good traffic volumes. The traffic safety standards for key routes need to be updated.
On the Transportation Safety Board, we noted with interest the comments made by Kathy Fox, chair of the TSB, when she appeared before this committee in February. She said that Transport Canada has recommendations from the TSB back to 2013 that have yet to be acted upon.