Mr. Speaker, the Transportation Safety Board is charged with investigating accidents and making recommendations to the government on how to prevent them in the future. The Auditor General is charged with ensuring that the government is providing the services it should and that resources are being spent effectively.

Last year the Auditor General put forward a scathing review of Transport Canada's ability to properly assess and police the railways' safety management systems. He noted, among other things, that Transport Canada had not managed to perform most of the planned audits of the safety management systems. Only 26% over a three-year period, ending before Lac-Mégantic, of the audits were actually performed by Transport Canada.

For its part, the Transportation Safety Board, in its report on the Lac-Mégantic disaster, was also highly critical of the oversight of MMA by Transport Canada. The report said:

...Transport Canada's regional office in Quebec had identified MMA as a company with an elevated level of risk that required more frequent inspections. ...

In addition, although MMA had developed a safety management system in 2002, Transport Canada's regional office in Quebec did not audit it until 2010—even though this is Transport Canada's responsibility, and despite clear indications (via inspections) that the company's safety management system was not effective. Transport Canada Headquarters in Ottawa, meanwhile, did not effectively monitor the Region's activities. As a result, it was not aware of any weaknesses in oversight of regional railways in Quebec, and it did not intervene.

With all of these problems with Transport Canada happening, it is a wonder that the current government actually acted by cutting Transport Canada's budgets for rail and dangerous goods safety by at least 20%. The minister might try to claim that these are merely back office positions, but the facts tell a different story.

According to a story in Business News Network, just in December, 15% of the jobs in Transport Canada's dangerous goods and rail safety divisions are open across the country, and eight of 19 engineering positions within the dangerous goods division in the Ottawa region headquarters are unfilled. That is almost 50%. A position for the manager of dangerous goods inspection in the rail safety division is vacant. Nationally the vacancies include a superintendent of gas containment and several specialists on containment means for dangerous cargo. The records show that more than 30 positions in the dangerous goods and rail safety divisions have been vacant since 2009. Some resulted from 2012 budget cuts that forced four senior engineers into retirement.

However, Transport Canada is projecting further reductions to its workforce under government efforts to eliminate the federal deficit. It estimates the budget will shrink from $1.7 billion to $950 million within three years, including about $600,000 in cuts to the rail safety and dangerous goods divisions.

“It seems the importance of this role [of qualified engineers] was not taken into consideration when cost-cutting measures were implemented at Transport Canada”, said Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service Canada labour union that represents the engineers.

Transport Canada also publishes a watch list, and that watch list identified four items in rail safety that needed immediate attention, two of which have been on the Conservative government's watch list for the past five years. TSB found two significant recommendations for the rail sector that are now over five years old and have had no action.

One is that there are no video or voice recorders on trains. The TSB has been regularly demanding them; the Conservative government has been regularly ignoring this demand. Airplanes have managed to do it for decades, so it is not reinventing the wheel, but the problem persists.

The other recommendation is action to prevent missed signals. Most other countries on the planet have some form of positive train control on trains in their jurisdiction. Canada has simply just ignored the problem, and we will continue until there is another major disaster like Lac-Mégantic unless the government steps in and does something.

Mike Sullivan

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Adjournment Motion

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