44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 7, 2023 02:00PM
- Jun/7/23 7:14:16 p.m.
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moved that the 5th report of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities presented on Thursday, June 2, 2022, be concurred in.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in this concurrence debate regarding the 5th report of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, entitled “Railway Safety and the Effects of Railway Operations on the Surrounding Communities in Which They Operate”.
This is an issue and a topic that is close to the hearts of many people on northwest B.C. in the riding of Skeena—Bulkley Valley, which I am so proud to represent. At the outset, I would like to pay tribute to a couple of people.
First is to a wonderful woman named Dawn Remington, who lived in the community of Smithers, where I live. She was deeply committed to the environment and to the safety of her community. She was concerned about the topic of rail safety. During the course of the committee's study, Dawn appeared before the committee to present the concerns of residents. Sadly, she passed away before the report was tabled. Tonight, I will be speaking in her memory.
Second, I want to pay tribute to another incredible community leader in northwest B.C., a woman named Alice Maitland. Alice is one of the longest-serving mayors in all of Canada. She served as the mayor for the village of Hazelton for over 40 years, and today is her 90th birthday. I want to wish her a very happy birthday. Alice has passed the torch onto her daughter Julie, who is now her worship in the village of Hazelton and is doing a wonderful job. What Alice taught me about politics was the importance of bringing heart, of defending the places that we love and fighting every day for the people who live in our communities. I wish a happy birthday to Alice.
Tonight, I will talk about the report from the standing committee. I am very proud of the committee's work. This is a report based on a study that we, the NDP, initiated. I also want to situate this around our experience in northwest B.C. The railroad is such a big part of our history, our economy and of people's daily lives in our region.
I want to talk about workers. I want to talk about the people who work on the trains, like the conductors, the engineers and others who are so vital to our supply chains. They do dangerous work in all kinds of conditions, in Canadian weather on steep mountain grades, up and down the line.
I want to talk about communities. The railway in Canada bisects so many communities and runs through so many communities. In the region I represent, the railroad was really the founding reason for many of the non-indigenous communities, including Smithers. It is a community named after Sir Alfred Smithers, who was the superintendent of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. It is a big part of who we are, yet at the same time, we have a lot of work to do to ensure that rail transport in our country is done safely and that the people who work in that sector are protected when they go to work.
The concerns of workers was something that the committee heard quite a bit about in the testimony. We heard from Teamsters and other unions representing workers. In my job as a member of Parliament, I have talked to dozens of railroad workers who have brought forward their concerns.
Their concerns are really about the safety of the job. I think that is the biggest thing. At the top of the list are concerns about fatigue, the scheduling of the rail companies and the way that impacts workers. These folks work under some pretty strenuous conditions.
The railroads run 24-7, and the way the shifts are scheduled often puts a strain on these workers' lives. They have to be on call. They have to be able to jump at a moment's notice, get on a train and drive it somewhere. Certainly, many workers have expressed to me the challenges of fatigue and the challenges of getting enough rest.
At the committee, we also heard about the condition of some rest facilities the railway companies utilize to ensure that rail workers are getting rest. Many of them are located directly next to the train tracks. Of course, when there are trains going by every hour, we can imagine how difficult it is to get the necessary rest. We need to ensure that those facilities are kept up to a standard where these important workers are able to get the rest they need so they can perform their work in a safe way.
When we talk about workers, I am reminded of the tragedies in this country that have taken rail workers' lives. Most recently, there was a horrible tragedy in my home province of British Columbia. In February 2019, a Canadian Pacific grain train was parked on a steep mountain grade just outside the community of Field. It was very cold, and the brakes were set on the train. They were set overnight, and in the morning, a crew had to replace the previous crew, so a new crew was brought in. These three men climbed on board the locomotive. The parking brakes on the train failed because of the cold weather. The train ran away, and minutes later, all three were killed in a horrible derailment.
Their names were Andrew Dockrell, the engineer; Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer, the trainee; and Dylan Paradis, the conductor on that train.
I had a chance to speak with some of the family members of these three men, and they described just how horrific and painful this incident was. They described for me their determination to ensure that no other families of rail workers go through what they went through. I am continually inspired by the work that they are doing in the memory—
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Madam Speaker, I was talking about the three rail workers who lost their lives near Field and how inspiring it has been to work with their family members to create a legacy of safety for other railroad families.
There are a number of recommendations in the report we are debating this evening that relate specifically to this. Before, I mentioned fatigue and rest facilities; these points are reflected in the report. However, specific to the incident near Field, there is a recommendation in this report calling on the federal government to address the profound conflict of interest that exists when rail companies are able to employ private corporate police forces to investigate their own accidents.
In the case of the Canadian Pacific incident, the first people on the scene were employees of the company. Their first call was to corporate risk management. This is not how potentially criminal investigations should be conducted. The families of these men deserved an objective and transparent investigation. I am pleased that the RCMP eventually undertook an investigation, which is ongoing, but we need to ensure for any future accidents that, when tragedy strikes, these companies are not able to use their own private police forces to investigate. This report leads us in that direction. Time is certainly of the essence.
I want to talk a bit about the concerns of communities, particularly around emergency response. In northwest B.C., we have seen a tremendous increase in the transport of dangerous goods by rail, particularly liquid propane. This is a result of port development in Prince Rupert, which has really been welcomed by the region and has brought a tremendous number of economic benefits. However, the reality is that this development has also increased rail traffic, and in particular, the transport of dangerous goods. When communities look at the tragedy that happened in Lac-Mégantic or the recent tragedy in East Palestine, Ohio, they are very concerned about what the worst-case scenario could look like. This report from the Standing Committee on Transport includes recommendations that speak specifically to emergency response.
Many of the small communities the railroad passes through in northwest B.C. are protected by volunteer fire departments. These are fire departments staffed by community members, who dedicate their time out of an ethos of community service. They have limited budgets, limited equipment and limited ability to fight the large industrial fires that could result from the transport of dangerous goods.
I will actually mention that, on March 21, there was a rail fire in my home community involving a single car of a relatively innocuous substance that caught fire. It took two fire departments, both Smithers and Telkwa, to put it out. They responded with 17 members from Smithers, five members from Telkwa and five pieces of firefighting apparatus. They put over 20,000 litres of water on this car to put it out. It was quite an effort. I was reflecting on the words of the deputy fire chief, Alle Jan de Vries from Smithers. He said that they were able to deal with that size of an emergency, but a larger situation involving several railcars would quickly outstrip their capacity as a fire department.
This, of course, comes back to the federal government's responsibility to protect communities. My concern, and the concern of many people across Canada, is that in this era of self-regulation and the hands-off approach of the federal government, these companies are able to rely on a municipal fire response that cannot deal with the worst-case scenarios that we are talking about.
In this report from the committee, we have recommendations related to maximum response times. This is something that community members deserve to know. They deserve to know when help is going to show up. Is it going to take one hour, two hours or five hours? What resources will the help show up with? In our region, we understand that there are specialized caches of equipment and personnel, but they are several hours away. Of course, we know that, in a fire involving dangerous goods, a lot can happen in a couple of hours. Therefore, it is absolutely vital that the federal government do a review and ensure that communities are properly protected for these larger events.
I want to recognize the work of the Regional District of Bulkley–Nechako, which is completing a gap analysis on rail safety. This is being done to better understand in detail where those vulnerabilities exist, so that, as communities, we can clearly communicate our needs to the federal government and ensure that people are protected.
Of course, there are numerous indigenous communities along the railroad as well. In many cases, Indigenous people in western Canada have a difficult history with the railroad. I think of the elders in Gitsegukla, whom I spoke with. They described how the railroad came through their village and right through their graveyard. They also described how their land was taken, but they were never compensated for it. There are still outstanding concerns about the impact of the construction of the railroad over 100 years ago on their community, and today, they share many of the concerns with respect to emergency response and the transport of dangerous goods. I want to give special recognition to the Kitselas First Nation, which also presented before the committee and provided testimony on its work to evaluate the risk to its community of from rail transport.
Finally, I want to talk a bit about the environment. The other big risk from rail transport relates to potential environmental impacts. I just spoke about the Kitselas, who are people of the Skeena River. The railroad in northwest B.C. runs right along the Skeena, which is British Columbia's second-largest wild salmon system. All five species of wild salmon swim up the Skeena, so the communities are very concerned about what would happen if there were a derailment that resulted in dangerous goods, especially persistent fuels like diesel, spilling into the river. They are concerned about what the response would be, how effective it would be and how long it would take.
I want to talk a bit about some of the safety systems that are currently in place and the concerns around them. If we think about safety management systems, these are the tools the federal government really leans on most heavily in ensuring some semblance of safety in the rail sector. I want to recognize the work of Bruce Campbell, who has done a lot of thinking about safety management systems and their place in the management regime related to rail. Bruce wrote a book about the Lac-Mégantic tragedy and has travelled to northwest B.C. to help communities understand what the risks are.
The Auditor General has expressed serious concerns about safety management in the rail sector, particularly the federal government's lack of effectiveness monitoring. Rail companies are required to have these safety management systems, but as of the Auditor General's last report, there had not been enough done to evaluate the effectiveness of those systems. If we do not evaluate whether these systems create better safety, how do we know that they are effective? That is the question we have to ask.
Of course, safety management systems were never meant to replace conventional regulations, monitoring and enforcement. However, what we see today is really a regime of self-regulation by the rail companies. We see far too few inspections by a federal department, Transport Canada, which simply does not have the resources to do the job that is required. The report from the committee speaks to this. We need more unannounced inspections to ensure that companies are following the rules, that materials are being transported safely and that the conditions that workers are working under are safe. One of the themes in this report is ensuring that the federal government has resources commensurate with the challenge of managing this important industry.
Earlier, when I spoke about East Palestine, I was noting a remark in the media from the chair of the Transportation Safety Board, shortly after that incident happened. She said that, in her opinion, she could not clearly state that such an incident would not be possible in Canada. Part of the reason for that remark was that she has seen how slowly the federal government addresses the recommendations that come from the Transportation Safety Board. We need the government to be much more responsive to those kinds of recommendations, and I think some of the actions the government could take are in this report.
This report is being debated at a very timely point, because, in the very near future, we will be resuming debate on Bill C-33, which is the government's proposed legislation related to ports and the supply chain, including rail safety. It includes a couple of amendments to the Railway Safety Act that stem from the Railway Safety Act review in 2017. Notably, however, this legislation is silent on almost all the recommendations in the committee's report that we are debating tonight.
That is a real missed opportunity, because what this report represents are the concerns of rail workers, communities, several first nations and others who are impacted by the transport of goods by rail. Therefore, I would hope that the government would take these concerns seriously. I have spoken to the minister, particularly about the rail police concern and the emergency response concern in communities, and we expect the government will table additional legislation specifically related to rail safety so we can address these long-standing concerns.
I started by talking a bit about the importance of the railroad, not just in the region I represent but right across Canada. I do not think any of that importance takes away from the need for us to ensure the safety of the people who work on our railroads, to ensure the safety of the communities through which the railroad passes and to ensure the safety of our environment, which, of course, is so very precious. As we continue this debate and think about how we can make the rail sector safer for all Canadians, I want us to remember the people this is about: people like Andrew Dockrell, Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer and Dylan Paradis, people who have been affected by the government's lack of oversight and lack of regulation in the rail sector.
I hope that, through this debate, we can reflect on the 30 recommendations in this report and that we can really think about what actions are needed; summon the resolve, as Parliament; and put pressure on the government to finally take those actions.
Again, the reality is that none of us wants to think about the worst-case scenarios. In my conversations with people around the region and within the federal government about rail safety, people rarely want to talk about what happens when the unthinkable occurs. They say that they are making the trains go slower so it is less likely they catch on fire. They say that the tank cars the trains are carrying have thicker walls and they are less likely to be punctured. However, it behooves us to think about what those worst-case scenarios are and to ensure that we have plans in place, that we have regulations, that we have monitoring and that we have enforcement that protects the people who matter the most.
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