Transport Committee on Feb. 23rd, 2026

[Chi Nguyen, Liberal, Spadina—Harbourfront, ON]

In terms of regulatory or operational changes, what would be most useful and advantageous in order to attract new global shippers and reduce the reliance on American gateways for both imports and exports as we think about the big system picture?

Larissa, do you want to start?

[Larissa Fenn]

Sure.

We've already talked a little bit about how the speed of CBSA approval for new container facilities and other cargo facilities needs to move at the same pace as the other government departments are moving. That is really important. It's been important to us, as has the ability to activate the infrastructure funding and to make sure that the funding is rolled out with the system in mind so that where those investments are happening, they are complementary to one another. By making sure that we are able to talk to the government and give our thoughts in a fluid way, I think we can really help move things forward quickly.

[Chi Nguyen, Liberal, Spadina—Harbourfront, ON]

Ms. Farman, do you want to add anything to that?

[Olga Farman]

Absolutely. It's important to confirm the designation of complementary ports in corridors as soon as possible. That will make all the difference, helping us chart a course for the next 50 years.

[Chi Nguyen, Liberal, Spadina—Harbourfront, ON]

Do you have any last comments on this one?

[Ian Marr]

I have no further comments.

[Chi Nguyen, Liberal, Spadina—Harbourfront, ON]

Okay.

Thanks, Chair. I'm good.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, witnesses, for appearing here and for your testimony on this very important study. I wish you all a wonderful rest of your day.

Colleagues, we'll suspend for a couple of minutes to allow the clerk to set up for our next round of witnesses, which will include the Minister of Transport.

This meeting is suspended to the call of the chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call this meeting back to order.

Colleagues, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, December 11, 2025, the committee commences its study of improving Via Rail security and customer service, and it resumes its study of supporting, diversifying and modernizing Quebec's and Canada's ports.

I'd now like to welcome our witnesses.

Appearing before us, we have the Honourable Steven MacKinnon, Minister of Transport.

Also from the Department of Transport, we have Mr. Arun Thangaraj, deputy minister; Mr. Serge Bijimine, assistant deputy minister, policy; and Stephen Scott, director general, rail safety and security.

Welcome to all of you. Thank you for appearing before us today.

We'll get right into it, Minister. For that, I'll turn the floor over to you for your five-minute opening remarks.

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, committee members.

Thank you for inviting me to speak about the Via Rail issues affecting passengers, as well as the future of Canadian ports—a subject central to our national economic success, our security and our sovereignty.

Canadians increasingly recognize that their quality of life and our economic security depend on transportation that is efficient, reliable and affordable. We have all seen how vulnerable it can be.

In recent years, we have seen how weather events, labour disruptions and approval delays directly affect Canadians, whether Via Rail passengers or the marine supply chains essential to Canada's economic prosperity.

I want to be clear: Via Rail must do better. This service is essential for connecting communities across Canada, and as Minister of Transport, it is my top priority to ensure that all Canadians remain safe on our transportation networks.

Following the incidents in 2024, the government instructed Via Rail to update its emergency management action plan within 30 days and to provide an independent third party report investigating the event and Via Rail's response. After Transport Canada completed its own review, we made it clear that Via Rail needs to strengthen staff training, address equipment failures and keep passengers' well-being at the forefront during any service disruption.

In response to the government and the recommendations of the independent investigation, Via Rail updated its response protocols and staff training, introduced new measures to improve communications with passengers and established a new reporting procedure to involve Transport Canada officials sooner when major disruptions occur.

Through budgets 2024 and 2025, we provided funding to Via Rail to replace its aging fleet and to implement technologies that will improve on-time performance. When our transportation system works, businesses increase productivity, our provinces are better connected, and Canadians are better off. This is especially true for Canada's ports, which are important not only for our economy and our supply chains, but also for strategic leverage in a world that is increasingly fragmented, volatile and unpredictable.

The Prime Minister has been clear in identifying rising tariffs and protectionism as a rupture. This is the time for Canada to become more resilient, more flexible and better positioned to seize global opportunities. We must strengthen our strategic trade corridors and invest in state-of-the-art infrastructure to modernize our ports, to keep Canada competitive and to reduce our reliance on the United States. There's no question that our ports are strategic gateways that will help us double our exports to markets beyond the United States.

Today, our maritime sector is a powerhouse of economic activity, with Canada's ports and marine shipping carrying nearly $140 billion in exports and more than $180 billion in imported goods for Canadians. In 2024, over 360 million tonnes of cargo moved through these strategic ports.

However, they lag in modernization and automation, and they rank among the least efficient in the industrialized world for containerized cargo. This must change. That is why our focus is on modernizing Canada's strategic ports, helping Canadian port authorities access private sector investment, increasing resilience to risk, and pursuing the highest environmental and safety standards. We are investing $5 billion in our trade diversification corridors fund to develop the infrastructure needed to move Canadian products to diversified markets, to strengthen supply chains and to open new export opportunities.

In addition, our $1-billion Arctic infrastructure fund will support additional transportation projects in the north to increase our Arctic presence and sovereignty, to improve connectivity between Arctic and northern communities, and to enhance Canada's emergency response capacity. These efforts will ensure that our ports and the Canadians who rely on them are positioned for success in a rapidly changing world.

Recognizing the need to be ambitious and to build at a speed and a scale not seen in generations, we also passed the Building Canada Act and established the Major Projects Office to streamline federal regulatory approvals and to create a framework for faster project delivery.

My department is currently leading several major transportation infrastructure projects that are already benefiting from this new approach, including the expansion of the Contrecœur container terminal in Quebec. A megaproject supported by up to $150 million from the national trade corridors fund, this terminal expansion will increase the Port of Montreal's capacity by nearly 60%, create thousands of jobs and inject $140 million into the economy each year.

With generational investments, bold policies and a clear commitment to trade diversification and Arctic sovereignty, we can build a safer, more competitive and more prosperous Canada.

I'm now happy to take your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Minister.

We'll begin our lines of questioning today with Mr. Albas.

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

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, honourable Minister and your assistants here today. Thank you, Deputy Minister. It's good to see all of you. Thank you for your work on behalf of our great country.

Minister, Parliament treated Bill C-5 like an emergency, so we passed it in essentially 10 days last June. You and your government told us that national interest projects just couldn't wait, yet eight months after royal assent, the schedule 1 list of designated projects, the entire engine of the act, is still at zero.

You've already referred to two full tranches of projects at the Major Projects Office in your comments, including the Montreal Contrecœur terminal. Why has not a single one been formally designated? When will you stop referring projects and actually sign the first conditions document so shovels can hit the ground?

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

Bill C-5, of course, created the Major Projects Office. I have the privilege of working closely on transport and other projects with that office. I can tell you, and Canadians should know, that the project pipeline is chockablock full of projects that are transformative in terms of our energy superpower aspirations and our logistics, port and other transportation priorities. These projects are progressing, in my view, extremely quickly through the system.

A number of strategies and projects have been referred to that office. Ms. Farrell has assembled a very impressive team around her to be able to quickly assess these projects. When we encounter obstacles, their job, my job and the government's job is to respond quickly to those. Our aspiration is to get big things done more quickly than ever, and the Major Projects Office is instrumental in getting us there.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna, BC]

It's very important, Minister, to get big things done. We just heard from the Nanaimo port that there were five years of regulatory red tape and costs escalated a $105-million project into a $160-million project. That makes it less affordable and more difficult to expand trade.

Minister, in Calgary last week, you mentioned that Canada has slipped on reliability. As a former minister of labour, you know better than anyone that voluntary protocols and interim orders do not provide the stability that our supply chain needs. Given your background, what is your specific solution to end the cycle of port disruptions, while respecting collective bargaining?

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

It's an extremely good question, and I thank you for it. It's something we're working on presently. It is true that Canada, to refer to the first part of your observations, Mr. Albas, has taken too long to approve projects. We're changing that.

It is also true that reliability around the Canada Labour Code and labour disputes in Canada are areas where Canada has suffered. You can literally see that when a labour dispute happens, or is even threatened, marine traffic turns around on the ocean, heads to another port and never comes back. Canada must urgently solve this in the interest of workers and in the interest of our nation's supply chain security and prosperity.

We are going to be consulting with labour, owners and operators in our supply chains to ensure that we get to a better and more predictable process. Neither unions nor employers like this late-stage bargaining and this eleventh-hour pressure. It disrupts families and other unionized environments across the country. I made the observation when I was the labour minister, and I will make it again, that hundreds of thousands of union jobs across the country are at risk, including in my own riding at a newsprint mill, when labour disruptions are threatened or are actually executed. We want to bring more order and predictability to that process.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna, BC]

I think predictability would be helpful, including regulatory predictability. Not designating anything under Bill C-5 is a legitimate criticism, as is whether or not you're going to be fixing the cycle of port disruptions while respecting collective bargaining.

Now, you say that you want more diversified trade, but anchorage is literally the Wild West right now in places off the coast of B.C., and it will only get worse before someone gets hurt. When will you replace the voluntary 2018 anchorage protocol with a binding legislative framework for the B.C. coast?

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

Frankly, I'm more interested in how we turn ships around more quickly so that we need less anchorage. I think the long-term solution to this is to have more efficient ports, where boats have predictable berthing and are turned around, loaded and off on their journey to foreign markets. The infrastructure we have is not always favourable to that. In Vancouver, and in other ports around the country, we have to work on the investments that expand our capacity.

Also, I'm glad you referred to my Calgary speech. One of the things that I went on about at great length was the fact that we need to digitize our trade and make it paperless to make it easier for marine shippers, for our railways and for our port authorities to understand and measure travel times, berthing times and turnaround times and to understand where the bottlenecks are in our logistics system. We will be working very hard on that aspect of improving Canada's supply chains as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Okanagan Lake West—South Kelowna, BC]

I want to say very briefly, Minister, that I appreciate the response, but I do think that you need to look at anchorage, in addition to more efficient ports.

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

I'm happy to take note of that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Albas.

Thank you, Minister.

We'll turn the floor over to Mr. Greaves.

You have six minutes, sir.

[Will Greaves, Liberal, Victoria, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning. Well, it's morning in British Columbia.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Will Greaves, Liberal, Victoria, BC]

Good afternoon, Minister.

Thank you for being with us today.

As we've seen in recent months, and really since last spring, the Prime Minister has focused extensively on expanding Canada's relationships in the Asia-Pacific, which is critical to meeting the government's target of doubling our non-U.S. exports over the next decade. This will—I think by necessity—mean an increase in volumes and capacity at west coast ports, notably in British Columbia, but as we heard this morning, some of the west coast ports are already struggling with peak season congestion and capacity constraints.

Could you please elaborate, Minister, on how the trade diversification corridors fund will be deployed to ensure that the west coast ports can handle the anticipated surge in Indo-Pacific volume without continuing this problem of bottlenecking that we're seeing?

[Steven MacKinnon, Liberal, Gatineau, QC]

Thank you very much, colleague MP Greaves. I appreciate your giving me this opportunity to say just how much time, effort and energy are currently being expended on getting our Pacific gateway right. That will invariably require an expansion of capacity, but we're also mindful that we're asking a lot of the people in British Columbia—and the Lower Mainland specifically—to host this infrastructure.

There's a lot of marine traffic, as you observe. Whether it be a small project like a debottlenecking or a large project like the Roberts Bank terminal 2 expansion, which we've been discussing for a long time, we're working hard on making that port, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, work and move a lot more efficiently for the people who live around it and for our nation's economy.

The trade diversification corridors fund will be an important addition to our investment arsenal. There are other funding sources—ports themselves have borrowing capabilities—but we will be working very hard on the west coast to make our marine traffic move more efficiently and therefore have a more competitive export economy in Canada.