Transport committee  Yes, I would, Madam Chair. Thank you. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, members of the committee. My name is Marc Beaulieu. I'm the chief transportation and safety officer for VIA Rail Canada. I'm delighted to appear before you today, joined by my colleague, director of go

Transport committee  Sure.

Transport committee  Very good.

Transport committee  Well, I'd like to say prior to closing that safety is incredibly important to us. I will leave it to the question period to make other statements.

Transport committee  Is that directed to VIA Rail?

Transport committee  With proactive measures, we monitor and measure the performance of our locomotive engineers thousands of hours a month. We monitor every train speed, every day, with our PSI system that monitors all of our high-speed corridor trains. We measure speed every day. Our performance c

Transport committee  The schedules, naturally, will vary, depending on the region in which we operate. For our high-speed corridor between Quebec City and Windsor, the schedules for a trip would be between three and six hours. They get a rest period between that and their next assignment, so the hour

Transport committee  I'll speak to my expertise from a safety perspective. From a safety perspective, we monitor and work closely with all infrastructure owners to make sure there's a proper level of safety for us to operate passenger trains on. We did so towards the Gaspé region, and we did that on

Transport committee  That would vary from railway to railway, so it would depend on who owns the rail infrastructure, whether it be governmental or private. In the case of Gaspé, it's owned by the provincial government. In British Columbia, it is owned by a group of communities, so I can't speak on t

Transport committee  We identified some monies in our 2016 budget to address our security strategy. We've been implementing it since the first quarter of this year, so we do have a strategy. The government recently announced some additional funding for our security strategy, so we're very happy to he

Transport committee  Thank you for your question. Right now, we are taking part in an in-cabin video and voice recorder project, in partnership with the Transportation Safety Board. Our locomotives are already equipped with event recorders that can be checked remotely, by computer, to ascertain the

Transport committee  I'm talking about two different things. First, there is the video and voice recording system. Second, there is an event recorder, which has been in place since the 1980s and can be used to obtain reference data and information on the train's behaviour at any time. The information

Transport committee  Yes. They are all equipped with event recorders that provide us with all relevant data on the train's operation, such as speed and braking information. They also tell us things like whether the lights were on and whether the horn was sounded as the train approached a level crossi

Transport committee  Well, from VIA Rail's perspective, our fatigue management plan is very rigorous and followed to the letter, without ever being comprised. As I said, we present our fatigue management plans to the unions. We work on them together. We mutually agree to them and we implement them.

Transport committee  I think locomotive voice and video recorders would bring a very important element to being able to manage safety. The current laws and regulations in place, and the current pilot project being led by the Transportation Safety Board, will take us to a different level. With that pi