Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for his very astute question. In fact, it is now the case that with most of these kinds of offences where there may be harm to public safety or to the environment, most statutes, including federal and environmental statutes, now provide a lot of innovative order powers for the courts. As we have seen in the courts, the latter actually give preference to those alternative remedies. Those would include, in addition to any monetary penalty, that the convicted party would have to invest many more millions of dollars in improving their rail safety, training, and in providing cleanup equipment along the rail line, and so forth. Therefore, it does not matter what the monetary penalty is, unless of course the rail lines are inspected and they are in force. In fact a million dollars seems pretty small in the case of a major incident.
In the House of Commons on March 13th, 2012. See this statement in context.