Transport committee  Can I pick up on that? We have had a very aggressive emissions reduction program for over ten years. We're the only part of the transportation sector of Canada that has actually reduced its greenhouse gas emissions in the last ten years, while we've grown exponentially. Mr. McGuinty, we have stepped out, and we're going to step out some more.

Transport committee  Let me take a shot at that first. As a service to the whole industry, we maintain a staff in the Railway Association of Canada who are the most expert people in the country on dangerous goods. They're located out west, in Toronto, and in Montreal. They work directly with the emergency response people from the railways if we have an incident.

Transport committee  That's correct.

Transport committee  We talk to the FCM about safety issues quite routinely. I haven't spent much time with this committee today talking about a number of our safety programs. To give you a couple of examples, we have a very active program called Operation Lifesaver, which specifically tries to educate the public, particularly schoolchildren, as to the dangers of being in and around rail facilities.

Transport committee  Mr. Scott, just to make sure the record is clear, I can't recall what the exact number was, but when CN was privatized, the government received a very substantial amount of money into its treasury in that process. That was in consideration of those assets, so the transaction was done.

Transport committee  I'll look into this, but there is a procedure--and I'm sure the officials in Drummondville are aware of this--whereby you can apply for a variance on the safety regulations, so that whistles do not have to be sounded. It requires the specific approval of Transport Canada to do that, and they do a special study.

Transport committee  I suspect it has been true in certain cases. Having said that, I think if you do an analysis of the hotspots for noise across the country, you'll find that most of them are in the B.C. Lower Mainland or in Quebec. We have more work to do. I'm not denying that for a moment, in terms of trying to make some of these conflict resolution mechanisms that we've been talking about work consistently across the country, but there's another party at the table, and I think it needs to be recognized.

Transport committee  Let me speak specifically to Langley. The city of Langley is probably the poster boy in Canada of conflict between rapid urban development and rapid growth of rail services happening at the same time. It is a very serious problem, and it's one that we've been focused on for quite some time.

Transport committee  Just to give you an update, the Transportation Safety Board publishes a monthly report on safety for the industry. In its most recent numbers, which were for September of this year, the accidents per million train miles were 11.7, so we're down below the five-year moving average.

Transport committee  The answer is that this is exactly what we've been doing under the MOU for the last few years. We have undertaken a number of very extensive technical studies to look at what reasonable standards for setback are, what reasonable standards are for the kinds of operations. It's not in the document you have today.

Transport committee  We hope the steering committee will deal with it within the next month or so. As I say, we're not characterizing these things as cast in concrete, because we just don't believe that's the right way to manage the issue. You should manage the issue at the local level in the context of the local conditions you're dealing with.

Transport committee  One of the big problems we have with parachuting things directly in from Europe is that we just have an extremely different kind of railway system from theirs.

Transport committee  We're 90% freight and 10% passenger; they're 90% passenger and 10% freight, to start with. We do long haul; we deal with huge distances; we deal with different climatic areas. It's just very difficult to set a standard in an environment like Europe and think it would work in a country like Canada.

Transport committee  Let me try to answer you. You've asked two or three questions there. Let me first clarify the role of the CTA. The CTA is essentially the regulator under the Canada Transportation Act, which is essentially the act that regulates our commercial relationships and also areas such as accessibility, disabled accessibility, and those sorts of things.

Transport committee  The process the CTA goes through to come to these judgments is exhaustive. I've been involved in a number of them personally. They go out, hold public hearings, see witnesses; they do all of those sorts of things before they arrive at a judgment. And it is a judgment: it's a very quasi-judicial type of process.