Mr. Speaker, the member is quite right that there is a lot to talk about when it comes to rail safety. The length of trains is certainly part of that. My father, who was in this place before me, has a long record of fighting for trains of appropriate length. It has been a tradition in Canada for trains to get longer and longer. That has an economic impact because for the goods that are not moving by train, it means significant delays. Safety is involved when people are delayed in getting to hospital. It is another example of successive Liberal and Conservative governments just not being willing to stand up to the railways to tell them they are changing their practices in ways that have serious negative effects on communities and they need to stop it, because they can still make money by running shorter trains. No one can tell us that it is not economically viable to run trains of a reasonable length.
Fatigue management is a serious issue. I spoke to that a little earlier. There are issues in my own backyard. In the community of Mission Gardens a new underpass was built and now the railway has unilaterally decided that it is going to start marshalling trains on the main line between the shops and the yards, which it never used to do. People who have lived in the community for 30 or 40 years are now saying they have cracked windows, cracks in their foundations, diesel fumes in their homes, pictures are falling of walls, and the government is not willing to tell the railway that it cannot make those kinds of unilateral decisions. Communities should not be forced to bear the consequences of the decisions that railways make in their own economic self-interest without regard to what is going on in communities.
It is high time we had a government in this country that is willing to play tough with the railways and let them know they are not the only ones using the land in Canada. People live by their tracks and the railways have to respect them.