Transport committee  If you're talking about the transportation of dangerous goods via rail, I wouldn't have an educated answer for you.

Transport committee  It could be a bit open-ended.

Transport committee  I have an opinion. There's a fine balance that we have to draw on this. Protecting the workers who are in place, protecting their health and safety and protecting their ability to do their job is, of course, of the utmost importance. I have that feeling 100% for all workers in t

Transport committee  I echo my colleague's comment on that. When we look at the port authorities in B.C.—I won't put words in my friend's mouth—we have to look at the boards of directors. Without any type of labour or community organizations represented on the port authority boards, how do we have c

Transport committee  I can speak only to ports in B.C. I see no community interest on these port authority boards. I see no labour; I see big business, and they're all political appointees. The other aspect is that, when I've seen some of the MPs here on this panel asking questions about where the m

Transport committee  Thank you. My name is Rob Ashton. I'm the national president for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada, which represents approximately 8,000 longshore workers who work in the ports of Canada's Pacific coast, including the Vancouver Fraser, Prince Rupert, Nanaimo

Transport committee  According to the letter, we had around 24 hours to respond. They gave it to us on a Sunday, and we had to respond by the Monday. We responded on Tuesday, because they have no right to....

Transport committee  It's too little, too late. We're not going to accept a promise of 800 jobs—a promise that they make—that will destroy anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 jobs, approximately. We can't put that many working people's jobs on the chopping block. There's no way. The environmental impacts

Transport committee  You bet. Currently, in four ports on the west coast of the United States, there are some, including our international president and our international vice-president, who currently sit on their authority boards—or port commissions, I think they're called down there. They are able

Transport committee  We were actually quite surprised. The ILWU is split into two different divisions. There's the longshore division and then ILWU Canada. The longshore division was quite shocked by that letter, especially on the very next Monday. No matter what Mr. Miller says in his testimony,

Transport committee  Do you want to take this first, Bonnie, or do you want me to?

Transport committee  All right. How do we compare with other nations? We're actually doing very well. We have some levels of automation at our current container terminals. These were negotiated between the terminal operator and the union. What that did is create more space at the terminals. There ha

Transport committee  No. Automated terminals are actually very bad for the people of Canada and for the country. If you look at Los Angeles and Long Beach, they created one automated terminal, and then there was a systematic effect that forced all the other conventional terminals to go automated to

Transport committee  Not at all. My friend just said that they don't even know the level of automation. The VFPA themselves have told us that all horizontal traffic on the terminal will be automated. That's all the tractor trailers, all the rubber-tired gantries. Those will be all automated. That's h

Transport committee  I just shut my camera off, so that I don't have the same issue I had earlier. The problem with moving boxes isn't at the container terminals. We move them on and off as best and as fast as we can. The problems that we see are in getting the railcars from the east coast.