Transport committee  Thank you, Chair, for this opportunity to appear before the committee today. My name is Tom Oommen. I am the chief compliance and enforcement officer of the Canadian Transportation Agency. The Canadian Transportation Agency was established in 1904 and is Canada's longest–standi

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, no thanks. I have no further comments.

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, that funding is actually not going to the Canadian Transportation Agency. I defer to Mr. McCrorie on that one.

Transport committee  The examples that were brought up are good ones. If we take one of them, for example, the agency actually does have quite a robust system for tackling noise and vibration complaints. That's outlined on our website where, in the first instance, we ensure that the community and the

Transport committee  Yes, an agency order about noise and vibration is enforceable. Should there be complaints subsequently that the railway is not following the order, then we would ensure that the matter was investigated by a designated enforcement officer of the agency, and subsequently the railwa

Transport committee  Chair, I don't think the agency has the type of performance data the member was asking for.

Transport committee  Chair, we don't have such studies.

Transport committee  Thank you, Chair. Yes I will mention that processes of either mediation or arbitration are confidential. On our website we have time frames, once a complete application is received, as to how long our processes take. For that we list, for example in the case of facilitation, tha

Transport committee  Chair, we follow up on any agency orders that are issued following the filing of an application or a complaint. For example, if there's a noise and vibration order issued, then any subsequent complaints or any implication that a railway company is not following what they're suppo

Transport committee  Perhaps an example would be most enlightening. There was a case, for example, where there was a rail yard that was doing loading and switching operations late at night. The agency heard the complaint. The order of the agency was that no further such operations would be done at ni

Transport committee  Thank you, Chair, for this opportunity to appear before the committee today. As you know, the Canadian Transportation Agency is an independent administrative agency created by an act of Parliament. The Canadian Transportation Agency is created by the Canada Transportation Act.

Transport committee  At the moment, our backlog is about 25,000 complaints. It was noted that over the summer the number of incoming complaints to the agency was high. Since then, the pace of complaints has slowed down somewhat, but I believe the current backlog is about 25,000 complaints.

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, I can't really comment on the government action writ large. As I mentioned, the agency is an independent agency and we implement the regulatory framework. I can say that over the course of the summer a number of decisions were issued by the agency that helped clarify

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, I can't really speculate on what would have happened if the mandate situation was lifted.

Transport committee  One important thing, Chair, is that the agency has become very efficient at processing complaints. Before the pandemic, in 2019, we were processing roughly 5,000 complaints a year. Through efficiencies, we've managed to increase that to 15,000 complaints on average in a year. We