Let me try to answer the first part of your question first.

This really is an all-of-society type of problem. We have grown as a country. We've grown for the most part in the southern part of the country. We've grown along the railway lines that we built to build the country. As we've done that, and as railways have become more and more important to moving all the goods we produce, we've increased the traffic on the rail lines. Through various efficiencies and investments railways have gotten faster. For example, just the fact that we have welded track means that railways go faster and they don't make as much noise. If you're trespassing and you're wearing your iPod and you think you're going to hear a “ka-chunk” and a steam train is going to be coming slowly, you're wrong. They are going very fast. VIA Rail trains go a hundred miles an hour sometimes.

We've created a highway system on rail and we still treat it as though it's a back road. We allow everybody to have their own driveway over the tracks. We see development that just doesn't make any sense. We have dozens of examples of a municipality with a school on one side of the track and then under their zoning they allow a McDonald's right across the tracks. What do you think the kids are going to do all day? They're going to cross the tracks and go to McDonald's.

We have to think what we are going to do as a society. We need this corridor to deliver goods and increasingly deliver passengers, and safety is a huge concern. Today I've outlined some of the remedies I think we need to work on. The railways certainly are willing to participate. Railways pay for crossings. They contribute when there is a grade crossing improvement, when there's an overpass, when there's a problem with railway safety. The example given the other day was a motorized wheelchair that got stuck on the tracks. Quite frankly, the railway should fix that so this can be done safely. But this is an all-of-society problem.

To answer the second part of your question, there are rules with respect to fire, for example. Currently, if there's a fire and you have a train blocking the crossing, you're obligated to break up that train and clear the crossing. There are other remedies as well. We have municipalities with access to dispatch so they can know when the train is coming and the 911 folks can tell the ambulance or fire truck to go to another crossing because they know there's a train there.

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