Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak today on behalf of the New Democratic Party on second reading of Bill S-3, an act to amend the Motor Vehicle Transport Act, 1987 and to make consequential amendments to other acts.
New Democrats are going to be supporting this bill. It certainly is not perfect, as many other people have said earlier in this debate but it is a start, and we need that.
The bill establishes a framework for harmonizing the way different provinces administer parts of the national safety code for motor carriers. The national safety code pertains to both buses and transport trucks and is administered at the provincial level. It was introduced by the Mulroney government in 1987 in response to safety concerns that arose due to the deregulation of the trucking industry. However federal government left the provinces to adopt and administer the code themselves. So far none have fully adopted it. In essence the national safety code, therefore is nothing more than a set of suggestions which is a major concern for New Democrats.
The framework established in this bill would allow provinces and territories whose safety compliance regimes are compatible with the national safety code to give extra provincial bus undertakings a safety rating and issue safety certificates. This is a nice idea but functionally useless unless all or most of the provinces adopt the code. This does not appear likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
In the words of the Canadian Truckers Alliance, the safety code harmonization framework is “putting the cart before the horse”. Regardless of what administrative framework the federal government comes up with, the national safety code will remain toothless unless the provinces adopt it.
The Liberal government has the constitutional authority to impose the national safety code on the provinces but is not doing it.
Road safety, as was mentioned several times earlier, is the central concern of everyone in the House. We can write all the bills we want, but quite frankly we all know the highways that we drive on are in many cases treacherous at this time of year. They have potholes, cracks and great divides. These are very damaging to our cars and very often cause accidents between trucks and cars on our highways. I am sure Nova Scotia is right up there with Churchill, Manitoba and with many other parts of our Trans-Canada Highway as being a national disgrace.
The question is what is the Liberal government doing about road safety? It is one thing to have this bill but the real question is one of road safety. We need safe highways. We need a real road infrastructure program that is going to at the end of the day make it safe to drive from one end of the country to the other.
For starters, I would suggest in this respect that we need to see some real investment in improving our highways. Every year over 200 Canadians are killed because of bad roads and 16,000 more are injured. These statistics are of accidents caused by bad roads, not by driver error, bad weather, drunk drivers or problems with vehicles. They are accidents caused by problems with the road. Again it has to do with improving the infrastructure and putting money into our roads. These accidents alone kill hundreds of Canadians and injure tens of thousands each year.
Studies have shown that if the government would spend $1 billion a year improving our highways for the next 20 years, the roadwork would pay for itself in the form of lower health care costs because of fewer accidents. It would pay for itself in terms of disability payments and the many additional costs involved in road accidents.
Let me repeat that because it is a remarkable fact. Fixing our highways could actually save the government more money in health care costs than it would cost to fix the highways.
In conclusion, we support the bill. It is not perfect, but it would be useful some day when we have a federal government with the conviction and the determination to make the safety of Canadian highways a priority and turn the national safety code into something relevant, instead of just a set of suggestions that none of the provinces follow. We will support the bill at this stage.