Mr. Speaker, this bill is long due for its amendments and I am glad we are doing this.
However, I want to give some historical context of how these kinds of things have come about. I was witness to the Mississauga train derailment in November 1979, and saw out the front window of my house rail cars rising 200 feet in the air as they exploded, three of them, and then fall back to the ground. I was also part of the largest peace-time evacuation anywhere in the world, as the community of Mississauga was evacuated for fear that a whole railcar of chlorine was going to escape into the community.
I raise this because some of the safety regimens that we now have in place were created as a result of horrific accidents, rather than the other way around. Rather than preventing horrific accidents with safety regulations, we wait until there is one and then we bring in regulations. I think that is a little backwards.
The other piece of this puzzle that was created as a result of the Mississauga train derailment was the question of why we were transporting huge quantities of very dangerous goods through residential neighbourhoods. We should not have been doing that. Therefore, the Liberal government of the time put forward something called the Railway Relocation and Crossing Act, and suggested that the government would help railroads move their operations out of heavily built-up areas and into more rural areas. In fact there was a lot of money spent by that Liberal government moving CN Rail's big yards out of the city of Toronto and into an area quite a ways north, whose surrounding area is now completely devoid of housing.
However, the Conservative government of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney then withdrew the funding. The act is still on the books; there is just no money attached to it.
We have this notion that it may be a bad idea to have freight trains running through densely populated areas, but we are not prepared to do anything about it. As the recent derailment of the VIA train shows, anyone or anything that was anywhere near that set of rail cars as they collided into buildings was in grave danger. That is still the case. Even after we pass this railway safety act, we still have the spectre of huge, two-mile long freight trains rumbling through cities like Toronto, and right through our communities and neighbourhoods. In my neighbourhood, it has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The GO Transit folks are building an underpass under a couple of roads for their trains. Their trains are right next door to a CP Rail corridor. In order to protect their trains from a possible CP Rail derailment, they are building a crash barrier wall between the two sets of tracks. Now the houses are closer, but no one is thinking of putting a crash barrier wall anywhere along the corridor between the rail cars and the houses. The view is that we have to protect our infrastructure, this little trench that we are building. GO Transit has to protect that by building a crash barrier wall.
That makes the residents of my neighbourhood realize just how dangerous it is when a big company like GO Transit says it has to protect its investment by building a wall to keep freight trains from hitting its own trains. However, those people who live right alongside that corridor, whose land was expropriated in order to put the corridor closer to their homes, are now quite reasonably worried. They worry about their personal well-being and safety, the safety of their children and their houses.
A couple of years ago a train from Montreal derailed, and that train actually levelled a house. Luckily, no one was in it and no one was injured. However, we are not actually pretending that we are going to pass any regulations in this bill to protect people from that consequence.
This bill actually gives the government considerable power to pass regulations, and those regulations are in fact what will determine how safe our railroads are. The bill actually does some very good things in determining how those regulations will be put into place. However, it is the regulations themselves that we must hold the government's feet to the fire on, to make sure that these regulations are actually effective and administered properly by the government.
I will give the example of the recent derailment of the VIA Rail train in Burlington. Had there been a positive train control system on that train, that accident would not have happened because the train would have been slowed automatically if the driver or the driver's assistant had not paid attention to the signals. That system is in full use in Europe now and is how all trains are managed there.
It is being implemented in the United States starting in 2015, but the operators have been given notice since 2009 that this is coming. As of 2015 all rail systems, particular passenger rail systems that share space with freight, must have positive train control.
CP and CN travel into the U.S., as does VIA Rail. Are they going to have to retrofit their vehicles to be capable of positive train control because they are operating in the U.S.? Therefore, why are we not doing it here in Canada? It makes no sense. That is available through regulation; the government could in fact pass that regulation.
I will cite the bill. The Governor in Council may make regulations respecting “the implementation, as a result of a risk management analysis, of the remedial action required to maintain the highest level of safety”.
Well, the highest level of safety is positive train control. The highest level of safety is what we should be striving for. We should not be striving for something below the highest level of safety. Worldwide, that level of safety is what has become standard. We are the outlier; we are not at the highest level of safety. As was proven unfortunately by the deaths of three VIA Rail employees two weeks ago, that highest level of safety does not apply to Canada. The consequences were tragic.
The parliamentary secretary commented on the fact that rail companies have to get a certificate before they can actually operate. I am aware of at least one rail company starting up in Canada that was given an exemption by the Canadian transportation authority and will not require a certificate and not therefore be bound by this legislation. That is the air-rail link being built from Pearson Airport to Union Station. Why it was given an exemption from having to have a certificate, I really cannot answer, because the Canadian Transportation Agency sometimes acts in mysterious ways. It is a private company. Again, the parliamentary suggested that private companies should be free to run their businesses. However, as a public duty, we have to make sure that we implement safety regulations that protect the public. One cannot do that if one gives them exemptions. If one exempts them from being a railroad under the Canadian Transportation Agency, who then provides the safety? How does that happen?
The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is voice recorders in train cabs. They are not a piece of safety equipment per se but are an effective way of determining exactly what happened so that we can make the system safer later.
The train cabs currently have speed control recorders. In the conversations I have had with drivers they all know that those recorders are there and that drivers can be fired for violating the effective speed control on the pieces of track they are on. It is clear that their bosses can figure out exactly how fast they were going at any given time, so they pay close attention to what their speed should be as a result of there being a speed recorder.
The same would be true of a voice recorder. They would pay much closer attention to what is said and done in the cab and focus on their job more.
