Mr. Speaker, my question back in April was triggered by a report on CBC that railroads in Canada were hiding the truth from Canadians and that in fact there were some 1,800 incidents in the past few years, 100 last year alone, that had occurred but went unreported by the industry. My question was when the government would punish the rail industry.
There are $250,000 fines for breeches of rail safety available to the minister, and 100 unreported incidents in a year would result in fines of $25 million for CN.
CN had profits of $847 million just in the second quarter of this year, so $25 million in fines is somewhat laughable, but it is something. However, no fines were ever levied. In fact, the only fine I can find levied against CN is for failing to deliver enough grain. We do not punish railways for being unsafe.
Today our Leader of the Opposition asked the minister what she would do about the sixth derailment in the last four months in the small town of Slave Lake, Alberta. That is 2.5% of all rail traffic through that town. He asked if she would acknowledge that these are not isolated incidents. Her response was that the government has been working on rail safety since 2006. Again, that is quite laughable.
We have seen cutbacks in the number of inspections by government inspectors. We have heard from the Auditor General that Transport Canada has only managed to perform 29% of the necessary audits of the safety management systems of railroads. Finally, we have heard from the Transportation Safety Board that MMA had virtually no safety management system and was not audited before the crash in Lac-Mégantic.
It is true that the 47 deaths caused the government to act. Railroads can no longer run dangerous goods with one-person crews. We only have to wait three more years until the dangerous DOT-111 rail cars are phased out, which safety boards have been calling for for 25 years, and railroads running dangerous goods through dense urban areas must slow down from 60 miles an hour to 50. Of course, the Transportation Safety Board says the DOT-111s will fail at 20 miles an hour.
In the U.S., railroads must reroute dangerous goods around major urban centres. Here, the government has left it up to the railroads to decide whether they want to do that.
The fundamental problem is that Liberal and Conservative governments have decided that railroads can essentially be responsible for public safety and that government need only review the results and do the occasional audit.
The wheel that gave way in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, which caused an explosion of oil cars, luckily in an unpopulated area, would have been spotted by government inspectors in the old system. It is unlikely that inspectors would have allowed the myriad of problems with the MMA train, which killed 47 in Lac-Mégantic.
We have the government and the industry mantra that things are getting safer, but if incidents are not reported, how can the government say that with a straight face?
One has only to look at the most recent statistics from the TSB for further confirmation that railroads are getting less safe. Virtually every category of accident was higher in the most recent six-month period than the last five-year average. Main track derailments have gone up, three- to five-car derailments have gone up, and non-main track derailments have gone up. In fact, accidents per million train miles have gone from 12.8 to 13.27 in this six-month period. It is not true that railroads are getting safer, and that is without the unreported incidents.
The CBC report was only about CN. How many other unreported incidents are there on the other 50 or so railroads in this country?
In conclusion, the government has failed to prove that the system it has imposed on Canadians for keeping them safe with railroads is not working, and the evidence is out there. We can see with the derailments, most recently in Slave Lake, that it is not working and that something major needs to happen.