David McGuinty

[Government Advertising, May 15th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, if the Conservatives want to advertise their platform, they can pay for it: $750 million on advertising and counting, while nine veterans' offices are shut down Canada; blue shrink-wrapped commuter trains, while rail safety was cut 20% over the past five years; $20 million on 9,800 billboards, while infrastructure spending was slashed 87% this year.

When will the Conservatives stop bilking taxpayers for partisan self-promotion?

[Government Advertising, May 15th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Employment and Social Development has taken a page from the Prime Minister with his taxpayer-funded vanity videos. He paid public servants time and a half with taxpayer dollars on a Sunday to film him electioneering on Conservative policies that are “subject to Parliamentary approval”.

Will the minister finally agree to pass my bill, the elimination of partisan government advertising act, to guarantee that all advertising is submitted to a third-party review process before it is approved to ensure that it is appropriate, proportional and a prudent expenditure of funds?

[Government Advertising, May 15th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, like the Prime Minister, the Minister of Employment and Social Development is abusing public funds to produce vanity advertising. He used the employees in his department and taxpayer money to produce election-style ads on Conservative policies that Parliament has not even passed. The Conservatives think that public money belongs to them.

How does the minister explain that spending, when there are so many pressing needs in Canada? Will he finally agree to submit all advertising to a third-party review process?

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is easy. If they are prepared to exercise national leadership, and they are prepared to pull together all the parties that are involved that have a stake in improving the system, they can make some progress, and very quickly. It is not easy to actually convene them and find a way forward and get agreement, but it is easy to start the process. That did not happen here. They missed this opportunity.

We have to examine a few things.

Number one, the railway system in this country is as foundational as our electrical grid. We need it. We rely on it to move our goods. It is very much involved in success in wealth creation and particularly jobs in Canada.

Second, we have to have an adult conversation about the use of railways and our energy future. If the oil sands continue to expand the way they are, and we will see, based on oil prices, we will have a million barrels a day of excess capacity in nine years. That is if all the contemplated pipelines are built. There is going to be dramatic pressure on our railways to carry more oil. How are we going to deal with this? What are the consequences? What are the risks? The government does not want to have that conversation.

Those are the kinds of elements we should be bringing together to make sure, as we project outwards, which is our obligation here, that we get a better system that is safer and in which Canadians have more confidence.

Last, if the member thinks there is a disconnect between the water approach in Ontario and what has been happening here, he should go back and read Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's report on Walkerton. He will see very familiar language.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I never said that this bill should be thrown out in its entirety. I have an obligation to point out for Canadians where its shortcomings are. There are some elements of this bill that are very positive indeed and that we support. In fact, we can take some credit collectively. That is how we work here, collectively, particularly at committee. There are some elements of the bill that are very strong.

However, it is important to remind Canadians that there are other shortfalls, and the chief one for us is the undeniable fact that the government is not properly resourcing its own department. The government cannot ask simply for liability to be increased on the railways if it is not doing its job with its regulatory responsibilities through inspections and audits. The government cannot do that. The system will collapse.

With respect to the minister being in Washington last week, I do not know why she went. She re-announced something from a year ago. It is going to be a 10-year phase-out for most of these cars. It is too bad she made the first announcement on the DOT-111 phase-out. Had she not done that and had she listened to the experts who actually manufacture these cars, we could have saved a considerable amount of time and made a quantum leap to the new cars that can be manufactured right now in the United States, and soon in Canada.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, my good friend is correct. This is an obvious omission, not necessarily in this bill, but it was an obvious omission in the government's dribs-and-drabs response to the rail safety challenges we are facing.

I would say that she is actually right, as well, when it comes to the question of an adult conversation about the use of our tracks, who gets precedence, who does not get precedence, in terms of use of those railway tracks. Is it passengers? Is it merchandise? Is it goods?

In fact, I commend one of my colleagues from the NDP from Gaspé who brought a bill that at least is beginning the debate about what role VIA Rail should be playing, what role passengers should have versus merchandise and other goods being transported. That is an intelligent debate to have.

Unfortunately, we are not having that under the leadership of the government. It did not want to open it up and do the right thing. We are not talking about improving the system for five years or by the next election. We really should be talking about improving the system for the next century.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, this is a good opportunity for me to perhaps help the member understand a bit better how it works.

The safety management systems are supported by the Transportation Safety Board and by the Auditor General. The approach in a safety management system admits that there are at least two parties involved: there is a regulated sector and there is a regulator. The regulator is government. The regulated sector is the federally regulated railways.

There is a legitimate difference of view between the Liberal Party and the NDP. I admit it freely. We believe there is a role in the private sector to assume a certain amount of responsibility to achieve the highest level of safety possible. We believe, concomitantly, that there is a role for the regulator to ensure that regulated sector is in fact operating at the highest levels.

The NDP does not subscribe to this view. It believes, wrongly, in my view, that it should be hammering the private sector to a point where I think it would have a great bearing on its ability to operate and to remain competitive.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to join this debate. This is a profoundly important issue for Canadians. It has been lingering now for almost a decade under the Conservatives and has been brought to the fore as a result of the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic, where so many vulnerable and innocent people either lost their lives or their families were touched. In fact, the entire community was destroyed.

As a result of that wake-up call, the government has been reacting. What we are here to debate today is frankly how it has been reacting. What we have seen is a series of dribs and drabs and slow release of technical and regulatory amendments and bills. This is part of that process.

First, it is important to step back for a second and remind Canadians what this bill is really all about, which is changing the way we establish minimum insurance levels for railway companies that are regulated by the federal government. Second, it intends to create a new compensation fund that would cover damages that arise from railway accidents involving the transportation of not all but certain kinds of dangerous goods. That is what this bill is really all about.

When the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport spoke a moment ago he mentioned that the government knows without a doubt that the amount of money that it is calling upon the industrial sector to make available in insurance and in this compensation fund is a sufficient amount of money. I would ask how he would know that. We asked the minister, the parliamentary secretary, the officials from Transport Canada, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the Railway Association of Canada, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs and beyond how much the tragedy at Lac-Mégantic has cost thus far. No answer is forthcoming.

The mayor of Lac-Mégantic told us that at minimum it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500 million. That is half a billion for an accident in a smaller town. We were also told by the ecological experts that that amount of money would have been considerably higher had there not been a layer of natural clay in the subsoil in that area that prevented the seepage of fossil fuels into the aquifers below, which would have produced almost unquantifiable damages to the natural ecosystem in the region. Therefore, when the government states that it has the truth and the answer, that it knows that $1 billion or $1.5 billion is sufficient, I would ask this. What if, heaven forbid, an accident like the one that occurred at Lac-Mégantic occurred in downtown Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa or Vancouver? I think the government would be singing a very different tune.

I raise this straight up at the beginning of my remarks to illustrate the kind of obfuscation, subterfuge and unwillingness to come clean with Canadians that we have seen from the government on rail safety over the last several years. It is no surprise. The first fact for Canadians to remember is that this is the fifth Minister of Transport in eight years. That tells us that the current government's ministers of transport have been transiting through the department, whether upward, downward or out of cabinet. That indicates that the government has been putting in a number of individuals, not taking this portfolio seriously, not until of course this horrible tragedy at Lac-Mégantic happened upon all of us. That is important for us to remember.

The second fact that the government does not want made public but would rather deny, bob and weave, or create fictitious responses for, is that it is categorically and undeniable slashing funding. It is killing funding when it comes to rail safety. In fact, rail safety funding financing is down 20% over the last five years, year by year.

This year, for Canadians who follow these things, we are all being bombarded with obscene, unwarranted, unjustifiable advertising. Most recently it is the Prime Minister's own 24/7 channel, the vanity video channel he has that records him every week and broadcasts at considerable taxpayer expense. As they say in French, “c'est du jamais-vu au Canada ”. It has never been seen before. We know this year alone the government is spending $42 million on economic action plan advertising. That is a number Canadians have a hard time getting their heads around, so let us juxtapose it in a meaningful way. There is $42 million for economic action plan advertising and $34 million for rail safety. There is $42 million for advertising and $34 million for rail safety. That is the priority of the Conservative regime.

What the Conservatives are doing by subterfuge, by stealth, by miscommunicating, by misleading Canadians, frankly, is they are trying to create an impression that they are on top of this profoundly important public safety issue called rail safety. They are not.

The Conservatives have been consistently and repeatedly warned, first by the Auditor General several years ago who came out and said in practical terms, that we agree with the notion of a safety management system, unlike the NDP, but as Ronald Reagan might have said, trust but verify.

It is the verification where the government as the regulator of a regulated sector is falling short, mostly falling short. The Conservatives cannot stand up and look constituents in the eyes and say that they have enough inspectors, because they do not. They cannot stand up and say that they have enough qualified inspectors, because they do not. They cannot stand up and tell us that they are properly trained and not coming primarily from the private sector that is regulated, because that is not true either. That is in fact where they are coming from.

There is a capacity problem inside Transport Canada. A department that is filled with good people, passionate, dedicated public servants, is being cash starved by a government spending $42 million on economic action plan advertising. As a result, it is our view that the government is putting Canadians at risk. Do not take our word for it; take the word of the Auditor General.

VIA Rail in a three-year or four-year audit period was not audited once by Transport Canada. VIA Rail carries over four million passengers a year, and it was not audited once. The systems safety audit that ought to have been accomplished was not done once. In fact, the government's own numbers indicate it is only completing 25% of the audits they themselves say are necessary to keep rails safe.

It is absurd to hear senior members of the government claim that things are getting better and that they have made so much progress in these dribs and drabs releases. It is not true.

We have a problem; we have a cultural problem in the government. I hate to go back to this, but it is important because past behaviour often indicates a propensity for future behaviour.

There are at least five remaining front-line ministers in the government who were in Ontario when the Walkerton water crisis hit the province. When that crisis hit the province, they all stood up in Ontario and used the same language we heard here today. “We can adjust based on the estimates with supplementary estimates.” “It is the officials who tell us that is enough money to conduct rail safely in the country.” These are the same buzzwords and the same sloganeering that we heard right after the Walkerton crisis, where people died and lots of people got sick.

In fact, in the report by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, five or six of these front-line ministers were singled out as contributing to the Walkerton crisis. Why? They slashed the funding. There was not a sufficient number of water inspectors, just as there is not a sufficient number of qualified rail inspectors today. This is the same story.

One would think that the government would have learned from the terrible tragedy at Lac-Mégantic, but it has not. That is the context within which this bill has been brought to the House for third reading.

When the minister came to committee, I asked her not once, not twice, and I did this on purpose, I asked her ten consecutive times why she had cut the budget by 11% for Transport Canada, for a total of $202 million cut from the budget. She denied it. I asked her again and again. Finally, she turned to her officials and said that they gave her the numbers, that it was their responsibility, and they said that is all the money they need. Nobody believes this. That is not how governments work. Budgets are allocated. The Treasury Board sits down with finance. The PMO overrules, agrees or disagrees, and the money is allocated.

We have a situation where these choices have been made at the highest levels of government. I asked her ten times, and ten times she denied it.

It is funny because the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that those are the numbers. The Library of Parliament's research says that those are numbers. We are hard-pressed to understand why the government will not come clean. Why will the government not just simply say that it is making a choice, that it is cutting the funding for Transport Canada and cutting rail safety by 20%?

When it comes to the testimony of the experts that we rely on in this place and who bring a perspective that is invaluable to improving legislation, not necessarily perfecting it, but certainly improving it, the Conservative majority on the committee brought the hammer down and said that there shall be no more than two meetings of two hours each. It is serious. We are talking about billions and billions of dollars of insurance coverage. My prediction is we are talking about billions of dollars in litigation that will follow this bill, because it was not thought through legally. The government said that there shall be two two-hour meetings.

When I pushed the four top witnesses on this very issue, they all admitted that, in fact, they had not been properly consulted at all. They had never had a chance to dialogue properly with the department. They had serious, profound questions about the insurance implications, the distributive effects, employment implications, trade competitiveness implications, and beyond. That is what has happened here.

As I said earlier, in my view, there is no greater responsibility of a government than to keep its citizens safe. Canadians today are rightly concerned about rail safety. They are very worried about rail safety, and it is not just the terrible Lac-Mégantic tragedy. We have had three major derailments in the province of Ontario in the last three months. There have been many more in the United States.

The Transportation Safety Board warned the government about the DOT-111 cars. The Transportation Safety Board looked at the northern Ontario accident and confirmed that the new standard brought by the government was not satisfactory. The government came out and said that it has a three-year phase-out and retrofit schedule for DOT-111s, which it knew was false, but it had to put something in the window, instead of slowing down, taking a bit of time and coming up with a better projection and a better plan for the phase-out of the cars that are dangerous.

That is just not the way it operates. The Conservatives had to say something to Canadians. They were really frightened of this file, so as a result they had to make an announcement, even though they know and were told by the number one company in the country that retrofits to these cars are technically impossible to do. The minister was told by her own advisory committee that it is technically impossible to do. The Conservatives announced it.

People are concerned. Recently, many of my caucus colleagues held a very public, large town hall in Toronto on rail safety. They have since written to the minister herself. They said that they are “worried about the massive increase in shipments of crude oil by train, up from 500 tank cars in 2009 to an estimated 110,000 tank cars in 2014”. We are reminded that the minister's spending on rail safety, as I said, is down 20% since 2009-10. She cannot deny it. The numbers are there. “Northern Ontario”, they go on to say, “saw three derailments in less than a month between February and March”. They raised concerns about the accuracy of the current speed limits on trains routed through Toronto and for that matter, all urban centres in the country, whether trains with dangerous materials should be routed through highly populated neighbourhoods at all. Is that a discussion we are having here? Never.

Band-aid after band-aid after band-aid, image after image after image, rolled out of technical dribs and drabs has been the response to the wake-up call of Lac-Mégantic. It does not cut it. It is not good enough.

We have tried to work collaboratively with the government. I think there are many MPs on the government side themselves who are dissatisfied with this response, because they are feeling the heat from their own constituents, as they should, as we all should, because we have an obligation to get this better for Canadians.

It is hard for us to square a number of other technical parts of the bill which I want to turn to. One is that the parliamentary secretary got up and said, in fact quoting the minister, that they have been assured that there are no financial implications for the bill, no additional costs in bringing in a 59-page bill. Really?

I asked the director general of the Canadian Transportation Agency whether that was true, and she could not answer, because now one of the things the bill does is it actually takes away litigation and gives a new responsibility to the Canadian Transportation Agency to adjudicate, to decide on how much compensation should be paid if there is an accident if a claim is made by a municipality or province. They admitted in testimony that they are not qualified to do it. The director general of the Canadian Transportation Agency said that they will think it through later. They have to get it done. There is an election coming October 19. They have to get it done.

There is one technical gap. Another is related to a really important legal liability issue where the test as to who is responsible if there is a railway accident has been changed by one stroke of a pen. I want to finish with this, because I predict this is going to cause all kinds of problems. Now a railway company that operates a railway which is involved in a railway accident, simply involved, the problem with that is railways often pass goods on from one railway to another, so who is involved? Who will pay the compensation? Whose insurance company will indemnify for the cost? This is completely unclear.

The Conservatives were warned. They had legal opinions that told them this was a real problem going forward. They were told it would lead to difficulty getting insurance coverage and difficulty later on with litigation, but they ignored it. It was brought to them in committee by me, by others, by their technical experts.

It is unfortunate that we missed the opportunity to take the time we need to improve things for Canadians when it comes to rail safety, because we need our railways. They are a big part of the engine of the economy. I think right now we have an obligation to go back and build on this bill and get it better.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am a little astounded hearing the comments of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Clearly, he does not know what is happening with this bill and he has not been present in committee.

One of the big problems with this bill, 57 pages and counting, is what the Conservative majority in committee did. It circumscribed all of the expert witnesses to two meetings. That is two meetings of two hours each. In the most important single meeting that was held on this question of liability insurance, the four principal witnesses who testified, a large railroad, a short-haul railroad, the number one insurance company in the railway insurance business and the Teamsters union, all said there is a series of unintended consequences in the bill, a series of shortfalls, misgivings and changes in the statute that are going to lead to serious litigation. No legal opinions were rendered.

What we really have is a situation where the government is rushing this legislation through pursuant to the Lac-Mégantic tragedy, but, more importantly, with the deadline of the election in the fall very much in its window.

Maybe my colleague from the NDP can comment and try to help us divine why it is the government, instead of doing its homework with proper stakeholder outreach and negotiation to improve this bill, is so incredibly pigheaded about rushing this through in a form that is not complete.

[Safe and Accountable Rail Act, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to some of the comments my colleague made. We sit together on committee. I want to remind Canadians about a few things in the bill and the context within which it is situated.

The first context, and the first important point to remind Canadians of, is that on April 23 at committee, I asked the minister 10 consecutive times to come clean with Canadians with respect to the budget at Transport Canada in the estimates this year. Now the member will get up and say that those are not the real numbers, that the Conservatives rely on what the officials say. However, the reality is that the government calls the shots, and everybody knows it. Departments are allocated their resources, and everybody knows it.

Point one is that the budget at Transport Canada was cut 11% percent this year, or $202 million. Canadians should remember that when the Conservative government talks about rail safety. That is 11% in one department. More money was spent last year, $42 million, on economic action plan advertising, with $33 million on rail safety. That is point number one to remember.

Point two is that the bill was rushed through committee. It was a Conservative-dominated committee with two meetings. Here is what the four major witnesses said when I asked if they were consulted.

Phil Benson, Teamsters, said, “As far as I know, not at all”.

Robert Taylor, CP, said, “We got an answer when we saw the legislation”.

James Beardsley, Marsh Canada, said, “the answer I got was that it was not made available to them”, which is the briefing he provided.

Could the member explain those two points please? How does he expect people to do better with rail safety when the budget has been slashed 11%. Also, the top sectors in the country were not consulted.