Mr. Speaker, I would like to wish everyone a good evening.
The bill introduced by my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre is part of a piecemeal approach, the Conservatives' typical approach to rail safety over the past year or so. That is unfortunate. The Liberal Party believes that these measures should be part of a more comprehensive bill introduced by the transport minister.
For the past several years, Transport Canada's Rail Safety Directorate has been underfunded. It does not have enough staff and the employees it does have do not have enough training. The department has been led by a revolving door of Conservative ministers, with five ministers in just eight years.
According to the 2013 fall report of the Auditor General, Transport Canada needs about 20 inspectors to audit each of the federal railway companies every three years. Right now, the department has only 10 inspectors who are qualified to conduct these audits.
Part of the problem is that we have a capacity problem inside the department at Transport Canada. We know that with the current workforce, the department has conducted very few audits, only 26% of the audits that Transport Canada said was needed to keep rail safe in Canada. At this pace, it will take many years before the department audits all key components of safety management systems, the regulations and the key safety systems they are under.
VIA Rail, for example, carrying 4.5 million passengers a year, has not been audited in the three year period audited by the Auditor General, and likely not since then. For five years, carrying 4.5 million passengers a year, our passenger train system under VIA Rail has not been audited by Transport Canada's qualified inspectors.
As I said in my question for the member presenting the private member's bill, it is important for Canadians to understand that governments make choices. It is important to get the big things right. Transportation safety and rail safety are one of those big things.
The government in its choices, as it has a mandate to do, has spent more money each and every year it has been in power on advertizing than it has on rail safety. This year, it is spending $42 million on economic action plan advertizing and new ads launched today, announcing the government's new income splitting plan, measures that have not even been passed through the House of Commons.
While it spends $42 million on advertizing, it is spending $38 million on rail safety, this in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy and a 1,600% increase in the transportation of oil by rail in the last three years.
When we built our country, and Canadians know this, we built it around our railway. Many towns, cities and municipalities were built up and around the railway because it was our lifeline. It was our support system.
We have a lot of transportation of dangerous goods now through our municipalities, which is a high risk, as we have learned tragically through the Lac-Mégantic incident.
The government says that it will be phasing out the DOT-111 cars in a three year period, and I commend it for that aspiration. However, when we bring to committee representatives from the largest manufacturer of these cars in Canada, they tell us that is impossible. Not only is it impossible to phase them out, but they cannot retrofit the rolling stock they have and they do not know what to do with the rolling stock coming from the United States.
Furthermore, the government announces that it will inform our municipalities after the fact, that it will tell them a month after a train has rolled through their jurisdiction what the trains were carrying.
The Liberal Party has been arguing for months, trying to convince the government to come to its senses and ensure that municipalities are given advance notice so their fire departments, most of which in rural Canadian setting are volunteer, know what exactly they might have to deal with if there is an accident or a tragedy.
With respect to labelling requirements, the government said that it brought in new labelling requirements to deal with the type of oil coming from the Bakken oil reserves in North Dakota and southern Saskatchewan. It said that it was all fine, that there were no problems, until The Globe and Mail broke several stories saying that was not happening.
The government admitted it, had to climb down, and did the right thing by saying it was going to strengthen the labelling requirement and the inspection of that labelling requirement to make sure we know exactly what we are dealing with.
There is one thing more troubling for a lot of Canadians right now and it is one of the things being learned in committee. As one member of the committee, there is something that is beginning to deeply concern me, and that is the proximity of relationship between the regulated industry, the rail industry, and the regulator, Transport Canada. I am deeply disturbed by what I see in terms of the coziness of that relationship. I think this safety management system that is the meeting point between the regulated industry and the regulator is an important mechanism. It is an efficient mechanism, but as Ronald Reagan might have said in the past, “You trust, but you verify”. To verify, one needs the capacity to be able to do so.
This proximity of relationship was demonstrated recently in two statements made by Canadian Pacific, CPR, one by its chief operating officer, Keith Creel, in a speech in Toronto, where, if I can paraphrase, he essentially said he wanted government to stay out of the rail business altogether, that it was going to impede efficiency. Then a week earlier, CPR's chief executive officer, Hunter Harrison, was quoted in The Globe and Mail as saying that regulators “overreacted” to the Lac-Mégantic catastrophe, going on to blame it on one person's behaviour, which is unfortunately reminiscent of a lot of the debate around the Walkerton crisis, when another Conservative government weakened our capacity to inspect our water systems. That Conservative government's defence was to blame it on one sole water plant operator. Unfortunately for that government, Justice O'Connor's report on Walkerton demonstrated that government's cabinet was in part responsible.
We have to be careful here. There is a role and purpose for government in the 21st century in dealing with rail and transportation safety. The bill goes some distance in giving some powers and that is why Liberals are supporting the bill being sent to committee, so it can be explored in more detail and see how it connects with all the other measures, this grab bag of measures that has been brought forward since Lac-Mégantic by the government in piecemeal fashion.
However, we have to be very careful here. If all the pipelines that are contemplated are built in this country in the next several years and are fully operational going south, going east, going west, here is the challenge. With the expansion of the oil sands, by 2024 we are going to have an additional one million barrels of oil a day, which cannot be transported through pipelines, even with all the pipelines that we are planning to build being built.
Where is that oil going to go? It is not going on trucks because it is not economic, as we are told by the trucking associations. It is going to go on rail, longer trains, more cars, higher volumes. CPR is calling for higher speeds. We are going to have to be very judicious. There are a lot of risks inherent. Of course, there is money to be made and there is shareholder value to be created. We are not speaking against industry. We are saying that there is a role and purpose for government to step in.
I will close with this. I asked the minister several times to give us details about how many inspectors are on staff. When I got the answer from the minister, I sent it to the Auditor General. This is what I heard back in writing:
...we cannot provide any level of assurance on the information recently provided by Transport Canada officials. The Department does not specify how many qualified inspectors it currently has available to conduct audits.
It is a deeply disturbing comment from the Auditor General of Canada. We have a long way to go to get this right.