Thank you, Chair, and thank you, honourable members, for inviting me to testify before this committee.

I want to make a few initial points at the outset about Lac-Mégantic. I presume that Mr. Bellefleur is going to focus his comments on that. I think it's important that we remember. It's easy to forget, with time, that the death and destruction that terrible night were without precedent on Canadian soil in over a century.

My second point is that I continue to be troubled that a commission of inquiry still has not been held.

Finally, CP Rail's continued denial of its role in the disaster is inexcusable, though not surprising.

My focus here is on the effectiveness of the safety oversight regime: safety management systems. SMS were a major shift from prescriptive regulation, leaving the railways much greater leeway to manage their operations. When they were introduced in 2002, officials insisted that they would constitute an additional safety layer. They still do.

However, no additional regulatory resources were provided. In fact, they continued to be squeezed. The number of unannounced on-site inspections dwindled. SMS has become a form of blame-shifting, providing cover for the government. After an accident, the language turns to blame: “We set the rules. They didn't follow the rules.” We saw this in Lac-Mégantic for sure.

Safety management systems have been on the Transportation Safety Board's watch-list since the list was created in 2010 to highlight “issues posing the greatest threat to Canada's transportation system”. They're still there.

I want to now address the status of a few SMS-related recommendations from your 2016 “Update on Rail Safety” report.

Recommendation 14 involved action to improve “fatigue management”. Since 1994, the TSB has identified sleep-related fatigue as a contributing or risk factor in 31 rail occurrences. It first made it onto the TSB watch-list in 2016. It's still there. Science-based fatigue management practices continue to be thwarted by the companies. It's a major safety risk that's still not dealt with.

The second recommendation involved re-examining the rules on “maximum wear of rails”. Since 2014, seven trains carrying crude oil have derailed and spilled their contents. Four resulted in fires, most recently in 2020. In each, a major cause was track infrastructure defects. A 2020 TSB advisory warned that the increased risks associated with the operation of key trains were still not being addressed by the current track safety rules. It also warned that compared to older models, the newest tank cars appear to be equally vulnerable to product releases when they derail at speeds of more than 55 kilometres per hour.

Finally, it was recommended that Transport Canada review whistle-blower protection provisions to determine if SMS is the appropriate framework. In 2021, two international bodies jointly ranked the effectiveness of whistle-blowing frameworks in 37 countries: Canada was tied for last place. It's clearly not an appropriate framework.

As you know, in 2019 there was a 25% jump from the previous 10-year average in accidents involving dangerous goods. The decline in 2020 correlates with a decrease in traffic volume. The 2021 AG report found that Transport Canada failed to assess the effectiveness of SMS. The AG called it “a big loophole”, not dissimilar to its 2013 finding. The environmental commissioner in the AG's office, in its report, stated bluntly that “the window for a recurrence of a Lac-Mégantic-type disaster is still open”.

The challenge, I believe, is to determine to what extent the current safety oversight regime is fulfilling its obligation to protect the public and what needs to be done to improve that.

I think I'm at my time limit. I make a number of recommendations. We could deal with them in the Q and A, or I could provide my list to the clerk for you.

Thank you very much.