Thank you, Chair. It's a pleasure to be with the committee today on behalf of CIAC.

Our chemistry and plastics industry is your third-largest manufacturing sector in Canada and the second-largest rail shipper. About 80% of all that we make in Canada is shipped by rail, and we take our responsibilities for the safe production, safe handling and safe transportation of our products very seriously.

What I want to share with you is that we don't just meet regulatory requirements; we go well beyond those. We can talk about some of our responses to some of the questions you had earlier, as you see fit.

Forty years ago this month, in fact, and in response to the Mississauga train derailment and other incidents, our association founded the Responsible Care initiative, not only to improve our safety performance, but, most importantly, to improve trust with the communities we operate in and the communities we move our products through. Today, participation in Responsible Care is a condition of membership in our association. There are many commitments to transportation safety in Responsible Care, and those are audited within our member companies every three years. That includes transportation emergency management.

Let me just share two aspects of Responsible Care that relate most closely to the transportation of dangerous goods.

First, very clearly, we are committed to the public right to know and understand the risks and benefits of the products that travel through their communities, whether it's by rail, road, ship or pipeline. In partnership with the Railway Association of Canada, we operate TRANSCAER, the transportation community awareness emergency response initiative. TRANSCAER members work with municipal officials, emergency responders—whether they're staff or volunteers—and residents along the transportation routes. We work to assist them in developing and evaluating their own community emergency response plans.

A highlight or a drawing card, if you will, of these outreach sessions and education sessions that we try to do is our safety train. This is a converted rail car that's a classroom on wheels. It travels across Canada from spring through fall, to a wide number of communities, to act as a focal point to bring the shippers, the railways, the emergency response contractors, the first responders and elected officials together to build relationships and talk about these goods and how to manage them safely. It provides hands-on training to first responders and the community; it raises awareness of the products going through and the risks, and it supports the first responders in being prepared to respond to emergencies involving our members' goods.

Most importantly, though, and we hear this all the time, is that the main benefit of TRANSCAER is building trust and relationships between the first responders in the communities and the industry, whether that's the shippers, the railways or the emergency contractors, so that when those people do arrive on site, everybody knows what everybody's job is. They're trusted, and they know that the information they're being provided with is appropriate and accurate.

In recent years, as was just discussed by the chief, a lot of attention has been focused on the movement of dangerous goods. There have been a lot of changes to the regulatory environment, and we've been very pleased to see many other organizations join us and the Railway Association of Canada in these TRANSCAER outreach efforts, committing themselves to engagement and training with first responders. That includes groups like Emergency Response Assistance Canada, or ERAC, the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs, the Canadian Emergency Response Contractors' Alliance, the Canadian Fuels Association, Responsible Distribution Canada and others.

Second, our members are obligated to ensure—and this comes up a bit in the questions you were asking—that they use only certified professionals with adequately trained personnel who have the equipment and training to handle the specific commodities that our members are shipping.

One member of emergency response personnel is not the same as another. What is their training? How well equipped are they? Do they have the right equipment to respond to the emergencies involving our members' products?

This is done through another initiative, called the transportation emergency assistance program, or TEAP. We're actually on TEAP version three, and we refer to it as TEAP III. Through TEAP and our partners, we've established and we maintain a national emergency response network that's capable of safely and efficiently mitigating the impacts of a chemical transportation incident anywhere in the country. There are standards that must be met and regularly reconfirmed. These are registered emergency response contractors. There's a registration process to ensure that those people are adequately and appropriately trained to respond to these emergencies.

We do work with many others, including the Railway Association, the two class 1 railways and others on that process.

I'm very proud of the work we do on transportation safety. Our members experience far fewer and far less severe incidents than in the past. Nevertheless, transportation safety, including and especially that of dangerous goods, requires constant vigilance and a constant commitment to continual improvement. We definitely commend this committee and its attention to this activity.

Probably there's nowhere in public policy in Canada where we have seen more change and more reform than in the transportation of dangerous goods over the last 10 to 12 years, and that's okay. That's appropriate. The spirit with which Transport Canada, the Government of Canada and all the stakeholders come together to advance that is probably not seen in any other area of public policy that we work with. Even participating in this discussion and seeing how you interact as a committee is quite unique, so never forget that all the stakeholders involved are committed to this.

The voluntary work we do through responsible care is not a substitute for regulation. You will never hear us say that. It is a demonstration that a committed industry can establish and demand performance standards well beyond regulation that meet Canadians' expectations for our industry.

Thank you for the opportunity. I look forward to your questions, especially related to the many improvements in rail safety and those around improvements to community awareness in this area.

Thank you very much for the time.