Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to the bill, in particular to the Bloc motion before us. Perhaps we should look historically at the motion. Railways were the first type of major land transportation. They were used years before cars were built and we had highway traffic acts in each province. Therefore the standards set out in the Railway Safety Act must be applied from coast to coast. We cannot put in a separate statute for a safety feature for one province and negate that safety feature in another province.
As my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands said, it appears the bill is aimed at one province, that it is not national in its scope. It seems to be a redundant and therefore I will not be able to support the amendment.
There is a growing concern that we should have a more co-ordinated safety program. Like my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands, I am wondering why we had to hurry this bill through. It would be more of a safety issue at this time to have a national trucking safety policy co-ordinated with this bill.
Eventually we will have to deal with a national policy on the trucking industry and adapt it to the bill before us. That could have been done in conjunction with this bill which would have made abundantly more sense than pushing this bill through as quickly as we did. The last time the Standing Committee on Transport met we had a presentation on ITS, intelligent transportation systems. This presentation proved to the few members there that this is the coming thing. ITS no doubt in the future are there not just for the railway system but for the trucking system. They are there for the automobile, all traffic, and should have been co-ordinated. All these things should be built in to one facet of a National Safety Council presentation.
The railways in the United States, because they are the oldest, are reneging about getting into ITS. I suggest to hon. members opposite that the same would be true in Canada that the railways will be the last to co-operate in ITS because historically they are the oldest and they are the granddaddy of them all.
What impressed me with the presentation, which leaves the motion out, is we must have a national program and that national program through intelligent transportation systems will eventually become a continental program. I agree with the member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands that we should not have pushed this so rapidly. We should have incorporated it not within this bill but made this bill more applicable and easily applied when we move to the highway trucking industry.
I want to congratulate a person who came to the transport committee. I asked him for a video. It was about safety on the rails. I viewed the one hour video which was excellent. The problem is it was made in the U.S. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, however the reason I wanted this was to see if it was all right with the copyright to make some copies, send it out to my schools, particularly on the two major railways through my constituency, for safety reasons to be presented in the schools.
I saw the big accidents of Amtrak, Southern Pacific and so on. I had some concerns about that. I encourage the Minister of Transport in working with other ministers in the House that we should present a Canadian video to each province's departments of education and schools so that we could stop these needless fatalities of children taking chances, playing on right of ways of the railway and the needless risking of lives at crossings and so on.
We cannot support the motion. We will be supporting this bill. The final plea I make is please look at the safety features not only with regard to the operation of trains but relating to the general public and for this department to come up with a good safety video similar to the one I mentioned produced in the United States.