Madam Speaker, I was surprised by the Teamsters Canada press release of June 2. It indicates that there have been, over the last 10 years, 10,000 train collisions and derailments, an average of 3 a day. I was certainly not aware of that.
In terms of loss of life in railway accidents, the largest loss of life was the Dugald accident in Manitoba in 1947. I think most people here would be familiar with the Hinton, Alberta train crash which killed 23 people.
This is a long-standing problem. We have been aware of it for quite some time. Other countries in the world are running high-speed trains. Imagine the money that would have to be put into our railway system to upgrade to the level of the Japanese railway system, where trains run at 200 or 300 miles per hour.
Even in our lifetime, we have seen the speed of the trains increase a lot. There are no cabooses. There are mile-long trains. We have seen the results of a poor roadbed and poor track system.