Transport committee  Municipalities and organizations like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities certainly have a role to play in the safety of grade crossings, not only in terms of maintenance, but also the development of subdivisions and community development. For example, if we want to build

Transport committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, that goes a little beyond my expertise, or at least my ability to come up with a good answer today. I've attended some Federation of Canadian Municipalities meetings where this has been a big topic of discussion. It's a shared responsibility between the mun

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, that's a very good question, and it's one we've asked in a recent report.

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, we investigate air, rail, marine and pipeline accidents. We have nothing to do with surface transportation, so it's really outside of our jurisdiction.

Transport committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] not aware of any current blockades at rail lines, but again, that would be for the government, for the railway companies or for the regulator to address. We investigate accidents and incidents, not those types of events.

Transport committee  Well, we do have statistics on railway crossing accidents. We have done a number of railway crossing investigations through the years. We are doing one now. A major improvement was the grade crossing regulations and grade crossing standards that Transport Canada implemented in

Transport committee  To my knowledge, we were not consulted, not was it necessary to do so. We have no opinion to express on the subject of the Lac-Mégantic rail bypass. I understand full well why, on a psychological level, the citizens of Lac-Mégantic want a rail bypass. From our point of view, reg

Transport committee  No. It is not our role to express our opinion about the safety of a route change. However, if there is an investigation after an accident or incident and we determine that certain factors were not taken into consideration during the change, we would mention it in our report.

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, that would be difficult for me to answer because I haven't seen specifically each plan for each railway. It was Transport Canada's responsibility to review and approve those plans, so I can't speak to whether they meet the current thinking with respect to fatigue manag

Transport committee  There are, I'm sure, a number of considerations. One would be that any schedule to address fatigue has to be done through collective bargaining. While collective bargaining should never stand in the way of doing the right thing when it comes to fatigue management, scheduling is a

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, in fact it took longer than that, because the first recommendation that we made with respect to physical defences in that respect goes back to 2000, and in 2013 we updated it with the Burlington accident you've just mentioned. We are very anxious to see what the deta

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, we absolutely agree that it's important to have activity and volume data so that you can compare apples to apples from one year to the next. All I'm saying is that for 2020 and 2021, given the effects of the pandemic and other events, the activity level dropped off. We

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, trespassing accidents are the highest number of railway fatalities every year in Canada. It is tragic to see so many people killed. There is a variety of reasons behind that. It is a combination of security and public education issues. We haven't done very many trespa

Transport committee  Mr. Chair, we believe that to reduce the risk of not following signal indications, which is often not a question of somebody just blowing through a signal.... We're talking about misinterpreting or bad weather. There are a whole bunch of reasons why that may happen. The ultimat

Transport committee  There's a specific definition in our regulations. In simple terms, an accident usually involves damage and/or injuries or death, whereas an incident would be when, for example, a train crew didn't stop at a signal, but they didn't hit anything or derail.