44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 8, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I am glad to be able to join the debate at such a late hour and to contribute my thoughts on Bill C-33 for my constituents back home. Again, I always want to thank them for sending me here to represent them, and I know they expect us to provide good work and feedback to the government.
As I said earlier in the debate, if it were up to the member for Winnipeg North, none of us would ever speak. He thinks we are delaying the bill when we are really just providing some feedback to the government at a stage of the bill before it possibly heads to committee. This is a bill that would amend these seven different pieces of legislation: the Customs Act, the Railway Safety Act, the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, the Marine Transportation Security Act, the Canada Transportation Act, the Canada Marine Act in a different portion and another act to which it would make consequential amendments.
This type of legislation would be an omnibus bill, but it is themed in a certain manner. One always knows something is up when legislation has a title like “Strengthening the Port System and Railway Safety in Canada Act”, which definitely means that the government is not strengthening anything. It is just making everything more complicated. The marketing people must have gotten to the legislative drafters on this one and included it here.
I share many of the same concerns other Conservatives have expressed on this piece of legislation. I will refrain from commenting on the marine portions, because I happen to be from a landlocked province. Our views of the oceans are very limited, as in zero, unless we go online. I will not comment on those.
I will comment on the fact that this piece of legislation would be establishing new advisory committees, which I believe could be a source of more consternation and frustration in ports and other places. I note that no tenants are to serve on them directly. There is no dispensation made to ensure that happens.
There are going to be issues with supply chains. There is nothing in this legislation, as the member for Langley—Aldergrove just said, that would actually address that. The reason we know this is that some of the largest groups out there that represent stakeholders who care about supply chains or manage them in some way have said so very clearly. The Association of Canadian Port Authorities, which will be my only marine reference, said that more government was not the answer. The Chamber of Shipping said that the legislation misses out on addressing the root causes of supply chain congestion, and additional powers only address symptoms of congestion and could aggravate managing cargo efficiently. Those seem like the people one would want to go to and make sure they are onside with legislation before one brings it forward and claims it would help supply chains to get better, which is what we heard from members on the government benches.
I will give the government credit for one thing. Thankfully, this is not a spending bill. That is good news for taxpayers back home, although consumers will likely pay higher prices once the legislation goes through because of the extra red tape and all the extra measures being introduced. It is not in all parts of the bill, but significant parts of the bill would likely increase costs.
In that spirit, I do have a Yiddish proverb, which is, “If a problem can be solved with money, it is not a problem, it is an expense.” Thankfully, this would not be a new expense for taxpayers. This particular bill, as I said, would not be directly spending new monies that we simply do not have, with a $60-billion-plus deficit already on the books and the doubling of the national debt over the course of the pandemic by the Liberal government. Taxpayers back home in my riding cannot afford to put more things on the national credit card. They are already on the hook for over $4,000 per family household.
I want to take a different tack, as I said I would. CP is actually located in my riding, and I visited it on March 2. Its headquarters are in an old community called Ogden, named after one of the former senior employees of CP. The community has had a storied history. It has gone through a couple of redevelopments. There used to be a tram that went over the river, and it would ferry employees back and forth. It does not exist anymore. However, this particular part of the city has a lot of history.
The command centre for Canadian Pacific is there; Canadian Pacific is CP now and actually merged with Kansas City Southern, or KCS, in a $31-billion deal. It is a really big railway company. It is located in my riding, and it is a big source of employment. Its career fairs are always very well attended because it is a good employer to work for. It provides excellent pay and good working conditions. It is a unionized work environment, and the union fights hard for its members, while management negotiates, much of the time, in good faith. The command centre and the training centre are there. The simulator train is there, which is very cool, and I will talk about that as well.
The hydrogen fuel cell train is also there, and I missed it on my tour. I just did not have enough time to get to it. I understand that other members, like the member for Edmonton Riverbend, actually got to see the brand new future of cargo train services in Canada, the hydrogen fuel cell train.
Let us talk about the command centre. I have represented my riding for almost eight years now, and I had never been to this command centre, which was open throughout the whole pandemic. It is basically what one would imagine. It looks like it is in the 22nd century. There are screens everywhere. People are working to make sure that trains, as they are moving across Canada and parts of the United States, are on the correct line. The number one thing the employees talked to me about was safety: making sure the trains were safe and were on the rails, and that any problems were addressed as quickly as possible. That is the whole idea behind this command centre: to make sure it can ship goods across the country and ensure the safety of the workers, the safety of those in the command post and the safety of those in the communities they are serving, because safety, as they kept repeating, is the number one priority.
They invest a lot of time and effort, especially on the training side, to make sure their employees can provide that guarantee. It is hard work to have to pay really close attention to what is going on. They know exactly what is on each train, where each train is coming from, and, if there are trains from other companies on their network, where they are and where they are moving. The command centre was an impressive place to be and to see people are on shifts when they are working, switching out and switching in employees all the time, just to make sure nobody is working while tired. There was a lot of live communication going on, directly with people in the field. This is a sector of the economy that is drastically changing. It is a 24-7 business.
In the riding of Calgary Shepard, there is also a huge shunting yard that was meant to be switched out and moved outside the city. That never actually happened. It was never negotiated.
The training centre is a very cool place as well. It is a unionized environment where, again, the number one rule is safety. People were very concerned about that as we were walking around. The centre builds everything. Young electricians were coming in, and before CP, now CPKC, actually agrees to send them to the field, they have to rewire and wire everything. They put them on this huge board, all around the training centre. If they make a mistake, they take it all down and make them do it all over again. Again, they talked about safety. They wanted to make sure that if they go out into the field, they can fix anything that is broken so the equipment is maintained, 24-7, as well as possible. It is not perfect, but it is as good as they can possibly do it. One can definitely tell that the people who work there, who do the training, take a lot of pride in their work and in the record of the company as well. They know it is their colleagues, their fellow employees, who are working for the company. They are trying to make sure they provide a safe work environment.
Being on the simulator train was really one of the coolest parts. As members of Parliament, we all get to do these things, experience what it is like in different jobs. I actually got to drive one of these trains. It really feels like one is inside one of these giant trains and that it is moving down the tracks. It can be sped up or slowed down. I had a conductor showing me what it looks like, what it feels like, to be in one of these trains. The weight of the machine as it is moving can be felt. It is a totally simulated environment, and a lot of people go through.
This is the equipment that people are trained on before they are sent out into the field. It is hours upon hours of training. I do not remember the exact number of hours they have to do before they are sent out on a train, but it is a lot. It is many more than in the United States. Again, they said that if they are going to put someone behind one of these big machines, they want to make sure they are ready for anything. In fact, routes they will be taking will be simulated as many times as they need, until the route is done without any mistakes. If one does not control the machine, it will actually automatically start to slow down. That is the active monitoring of whether someone fell asleep or whether they are actually paying attention. It is amazing what types of safety mechanisms are put into place.
I wanted to talk about this, because CP has been a pretty good corporate citizen in the riding of Calgary Shepard. I only have one CP cenotaph in my riding. I do not have a legion hall. I do not have other Remembrance Day memorials to go to, but CP has put on a memorial service every single year for the residents of the area. They have invited everybody to attend publicly. Usually, when they could, though the pandemic kind of prohibited them, they invited people for hot chocolate, tea, and cookies inside the halls, and they let people tour the different wagons and train services. In my riding, my experience has been that CP has been a good corporate citizen. I wanted to share that with the House, just to show that safety is in fact its priority and that they do quite a good job of it.
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