THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORT AND COMMUNICATIONS
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, April 6, 2022
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met with videoconference this day at 6:31 p.m. [ET] to study the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.
Senator Leo Housakos (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, good evening.
I am Senator Leo Housakos from Quebec and I am the chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.
I would like to introduce the distinguished members of the committee who are participating in this meeting, starting with the deputy chair, Senator Miville-Dechêne from Quebec; Senator Cormier from New Brunswick; Senator Dasko from Ontario; Senator Dawson from Quebec; Senator Klyne from Saskatchewan; Senator Manning from Newfoundland and Labrador; Senator Galvez from Quebec; Senator Quinn from New Brunswick; Senator Simons from Alberta; as well as Senator Sorensen from Alberta.
We are meeting to continue our study on the impacts of climate change on critical infrastructure in the transportation and communications sectors, and the consequential impacts on their interdependencies.
For our first panel this evening, we are pleased to welcome, from the Railway Association of Canada, Caroline Healey, Executive Vice-president and General Counsel; and Gregory Kolz, Director, Government Relations; and from Arctic Gateway Group, we have Sheldon Affleck, President and Chief Executive Officer; and on behalf of New Brunswick Southern Railway, Ian Simpson, General Manager.
Welcome, and thank you for joining us virtually and for agreeing to participate in our study. We will begin with opening remarks before we move to questions and answers from my colleagues. The floor is yours when you’re ready, Ms. Healey and Mr. Kolz.
Caroline Healey, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel, Railway Association of Canada: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good evening, honourable senators. My name is Caroline Healey, and I serve as executive vice-president and general counsel at the Railway Association of Canada. I am joined by my colleague, Gregory Kolz, Director of Government Relations at the RAC.
[Translation]
We are pleased to be with you tonight to participate in this important discussion.
The Railway Association of Canada (RAC) represents nearly 60 freight and passenger railways that transport tens of millions of people and approximately $320 billion in goods across the country each year.
The RAC counts a growing number of industrial railways and rail suppliers among its associate members. As part of the fifth-largest rail network in the world, RAC members are the backbone of Canada’s transportation network.
In addition, the rail industry is an important economic driver of the Canadian economy. Our members employ over 33,000 Canadians in rail operations, technology, safety, security and management. These railway workers move almost 70% of Canada’s land transportation merchandise and half of its exports each year, keeping us competitive in the global economy.
[English]
The number one priority for Canada’s railway industry is safety. Over the past 10 years, rail operators have invested more than $20 billion to ensure the safety and efficiency of their Canadian networks, and they remain fully committed to fostering a robust safety culture.
In addition to being reliably safe, rail is also a very efficient and green form of transportation for Canada. Thanks to substantial and continuous investments in innovation and technology, Canada’s railways are more than just economic engines today; they are environmental stewards. Railways are amongst the lowest GHG emitters in Canada’s transportation sector. In fact, rail accounts for just 3.5% of total transportation GHG emissions.
Thanks to this unwavering commitment to protecting the environment, Canadian railways have successfully reduced their GHG emissions intensity by over 40% since 1990. These impressive results have been achieved through innovative locomotive technology and operational practices. For instance, one locomotive can haul one tonne of freight more than 220 kilometres on a single litre of fuel. Furthermore, passenger trains, including commuter and intercommunity rail, enable people to leave their vehicles at home, helping to further lower emissions by reducing traffic congestion and wear and tear on publicly funded roads and highways.
Gregory Kolz, Director, Government Relations, Railway Association of Canada: Honourable senators, the RAC and its members share the belief that investment drives growth. Every year, the Canadian rail industry invests between 20% and 25% of its own revenues back into maintaining and enhancing its 43,000-kilometre network, which is, in fact, 12% larger than our 38,000-kilometre national highway system.
It’s also important to recognize that rail is one of Canada’s most capital-intensive, vertically integrated industries, owning the rolling stock, equipment, real estate, track and infrastructure on which they operate.
In the last decade alone, RAC members have invested more than $20 billion into their Canadian networks to improve safety, resiliency and network fluidity, competing directly with the trucking sector that operates on publicly funded infrastructure. Operating safely and creating safe working conditions can sometimes be challenged by extreme weather events, such as intense heat, frigid cold, wildfires, floods, storms and severe winds, to name a few.
While Canada’s railways have robust plans to address extreme weather conditions and help mitigate these associated risks, the negative impact of climate change on critical transport and communications infrastructure cannot be overstated. Over the last several years, in various regions across the country, extreme and often unpredictable weather events have made it increasingly difficult to maintain the rail network’s resilience and ensure the continued uninterrupted provision of essential goods.
When dealing with the consequences of catastrophic weather events, railway owners and operators bear the primary responsibility for protecting their assets and systems. Over the last several years, due in large part to the impacts of climate change, rail resiliency has been tested like never before. Nevertheless, passion and perseverance have helped keep our operators on track, and all RAC members have stepped up to serve their customers in new ways.
Last fall, for instance, rail resiliency shone through in the response to catastrophic flooding in B.C.’s Lower Mainland and Interior. RAC members pulled off engineering miracles to get lines shored up, debris cleared, tracks replaced and trains running again, all while facing incredible challenges and done within a matter of days.
[Translation]
Each year, the rail industry invests billions of dollars in infrastructure, adopts innovative technologies and practices, and increases training and liaison activities in order to conduct its operations safely across Canada.
[English]
Railways are also constantly innovating to reduce their emissions while maintaining high performance in the supply chain to ensure that products get to market and people arrive at their destinations safely.
RAC members have the expertise and the commitment to reinforce our critical rail infrastructure across the country, building additional capacity to meet today’s demands and planning for an unpredictable future. However, collaboration with others is essential. It’s critical that all of us together — railways, all levels of government, the private and public sectors and Indigenous communities — move forward together in innovative ways by helping Canadian businesses to stay competitive, supporting community economic development, and ensuring a safe and sustainable rail network now and well into the future.
Thank you very much. We look forward to your questions.
[Translation]
The Chair: Thank you both. Senator Dawson, you have the floor.
Senator Dawson: The relationship between the Transport and Communications Committee and the railway community has existed since the beginning, as our committee was the first committee created by the Canadian Parliament. We’ve been through a lot of crises since then, and of all kinds.
Among your partners, your two largest members, CN and CP, are often in conflict on Canadian territory, but often on American territory as well. However, the elephant in the room is that one of your members is currently suing the Saskatchewan government for several hundred million dollars.
As senators, we must make the decision with respect to this legislative provision.
I don’t know if it’s Mr. Kolz or Ms. Healey who could answer my question, but can you shed some light on this issue that has been debated in the Senate for the past few days?
Ms. Healey: I would say to you that this question is perhaps more for one of our members in particular. So I would be inclined to put that question directly to the representatives of the company in question, who I believe will be invited to appear before your committee.
Senator Dawson: The problem is that we are not in session for the next two weeks. Anyway, I don’t want to embarrass you.
Two of your biggest partners, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific — they’re your biggest partners, in fact — are in a dispute in the United States over an attempted takeover.
How can the Canadian government help you make sure that you don’t weaken the Canadian system, because some of the partners are in conflict?
[English]
I congratulate you for your cooperation. What Mr. Kolz said about what happened in Western Canada, in the Lower Mainland of B.C., is a very good example of cooperation between these two networks, and the smaller networks; I don’t want to minimize the importance of your smaller partners.
But I’m quite fascinated by the fact that you do succeed in this level of cooperation, so how can we help in making that cooperation easier? Because in the long term, when we go towards a crisis on infrastructure, because that’s what will be happening, you will probably face that more often than not, and yes, we talked to your members, but we also have to talk with the association. So we’re sort of looking for guidance from you on how we can help you help us.
Mr. Kolz: You’ve identified, senator, one of the key challenges that we face as an association representing over 60 different railways: They don’t always agree with one another, but I have to say that they agree more often than they disagree.
When it comes to specific operational challenges that they face, or business decisions that they make, we tend to not be directly involved. We are there to try to find areas of mutual agreement, I suppose, and we take pride in being the voice of the industry. But again, I think when it comes to specifics on how each of the railways, in particular the Class I railways, deal with each other and deal with business transactions, either domestically or internationally, that’s probably a question better suited for them, I’m afraid.
Senator Dawson: I’m more interested in government participation. We have been partners of the railway industry, like I said, for over 150 years — not just the big guys, but everybody. Facing the challenges that are going to be coming forward in the future, what is an ask that you can have from us so that the government can help?
Mr. Kolz: We try to foster dialogue and collaboration, quite frankly. A lot of what I’ve been doing since joining the RAC a couple years ago, having spent several years working in the Senate, has been trying to bring people together, raise awareness about the needs of the industry and, again, find common threads amongst all our members. The dialogue seems to be improving. But if you’re wondering what the government can do, I would say listen, engage and take the feedback that you’re being given by the companies themselves.
That collaboration, quite frankly, with the department, with the minister’s office, with parliamentarians and public servants in general has improved a lot over the last two or three years, but there’s still a lot more to do.
Senator Dawson: Thank you.
The Chair: I have to apologize, Mr. Affleck and Mr. Simpson. The chair jumped the gun a little bit going to Q&A right away, but we do have, of course, with us two more testimonies and witnesses before us:
They are Sheldon Affleck, President and CEO of Arctic Gateway Group; and from New Brunswick Southern Railway, Ian Simpson, General Manager. I welcome both of you. I invite both of you to make your presentations, and then we’ll continue with our Q&A.
Sheldon Affleck, President and Chief Executive Officer, Arctic Gateway Group: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and greetings to all the senators on this call. I’m the CEO and President of Arctic Gateway Group, which is the Hudson Bay Railway in northern Manitoba, with about 627 miles of network, and the Port of Churchill, which is on Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean.
I may be bringing to you a little different testimony than I would have a year ago. If you do a bit of Google research on the Hudson Bay Railway — and I can get photos back to probably the 1960s — it appeared that we have an unstable railbed and the problem is melting permafrost, so when I came to this role a year ago, I came on fully prepared for a major, major program in order to make a stable railway.
The good news is that I believe our problem is smaller than what we anticipated, and you probably won’t hear that very often. So here is the scoop on the Hudson Bay Railway; I’ll just mention the railway part first before mentioning the port. On the railway, of the 627 miles, the last 180 miles to the Port of Churchill is where 98% of the problems of railway instability have occurred. And I, like all the rest of the public, was of the belief that it was due to our melting permafrost or muskeg-type issues. But I’m here to report that I spent a couple of months up there myself last year, and we’ve done other investigations, and what I’m a little bit shocked to be able to tell you is that our problems — let’s say 95% of them — are within the top foot and a half of our railbed.
The problem of why we couldn’t carry heavy loads on this railway is that the track would move. All it takes is an inch or two, one rail above another or something, and you can have a derailment. But it’s because the ties are on mostly sand. What has happened — and I’ve determined this even from others who worked on the railway, even when it was CN-owned in the ’90s, and then also through the OmniTRAX years — is that it was improperly maintained by putting sand and gravel instead of sharp rock ballast. You cannot do that. I couldn’t do that in the Prairies on other railways that we have had because I would get the same instability.
So what we have determined is that we can do a much lower-cost fix. It’s still a big project, but there’s a machine that will go along and it will remove the bottom six to eight inches below the railroad ties, replace it with the proper sharp rock that we will get blasted from Churchill, and I believe that we will have most of our problem solved, and then we’ll be able to handle heavy loads on that railway.
In addition to this, we also conducted a ground-penetrating radar run in December, which was the optimum time, which lets you see the underground, the part below the track, to know what we really have there.
Again, according to what I would have believed — this railway is 90 years old, since 1929, and I would have believed that in some areas maybe they have been just pouring on more rock ballast over the years to replace the sinking, and that we would have had it maybe go down 15 feet, 25 feet or 30 feet; who knows? But what I can report from the ground-penetrating radar is that most of the sinking that has occurred is about two to three feet in 90 years, and I would say that’s good news as a prospective shipper for the Arctic, because we can do a repair and we can bring it back into place.
If we find out that we do have areas where there is melting and we want permafrost, we can check in most places, even in the middle of August when it’s 30 degrees Celsius out, and we’ll find ice within two feet of the bottom of the track. I’m sure there are some places where it’s not because, because as you go from north to south, you’re going to have a transition.
In those areas, there are some simple things we can do to drive down the frost and bring back the permafrost. It’s as simple as removing snow in the ditches. When the tundra was in its natural state, the wind would blow and there would be no accumulation any different in one area or another, but now, after a railway has been put in there and you push your snow back, you get deep banks of snow on each side. That’s a huge insulator that prevents the heat from being released from the ground.
So in the areas where we want to drive down permafrost, we’re going to do a snow-blowing program in those areas. There’s plenty of cold weather, and we’re putting in some temperature sensors that are going to be able to measure and tell exactly what we’re doing. If we need to drive down frost, we’re going to use Mother Nature’s refrigerator to do that.
Regarding the other part about the Hudson Bay and the Arctic port, I can’t report. I’ve only been on this job a year. But I have been able to determine that the shipping periods from that port have remained the same through all the records that I can find of the dates of the shipping. But if there is a thinning that happens, which Dr. Barber from Manitoba believes — from some of his research — would happen, it will make it easier for our icebreaking program to make it an all-season port, like a dozen ports in Finland and many in Russia.
I’ll leave you with this: In relation to the Arctic Gateway Group, I feel extremely positive that we can handle the issues we are facing today. They are much smaller than what I would have said a year ago.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Affleck.
Ian Simpson, General Manager, New Brunswick Southern Railway: Good evening and thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable senators, for having me tonight.
I have the responsibility for what we refer to as the NBM Railways. We comprise three short-line railroads, two in Maine — the Eastern Maine Railway and the Maine Northern Railway — and the New Brunswick Southern Railway, based in Saint John. We operate over 800 kilometres of track between the three railroads.
We are very uniquely positioned. There has already been a couple of references to both CP and CN. We are the former CP railroad from Brownville Junction, Maine, into Saint John. J.D. Irving purchased our railroad back in 1995, and we have been growing it ever since and expanding our reach.
We interchange with CN in Saint John, and, in fact, for the past 20 years we have operated the Saint John terminal on their behalf. It’s quite a unique relationship. And now with CP purchasing the railroad from Montreal to Brownville Junction, Maine, we interchange directly with them as well.
We also interchange in the state of Maine with Pan Am Railways. They are about to be sold to CSX. So even though we’re a shortline railroad, we interchange and soon will be interchanging with three direct Class I railways, and I’m not sure of a single place in North America that has that opportunity. It’s quite unique for all shippers, because, for example, a shipper could have product going anywhere in North America to the same destination, and we could ship three different railcars on all three of those interchange railways, depending on service, pricing, reliability, car supply, et cetera.
So it’s been quite advantageous for the shippers in our region.
We also support and interchange directly with the Port of Saint John. Under the leadership of your now-Senator Quinn — we miss him in Saint John — there’s been just tremendous growth and opportunities through Port Saint John. One of the things that’s helped us, of course, is having these various interchanges.
For the purposes of tonight, I want to also point out that we’re a shortline railroad, but we invest very heavily. We do distribution services, meaning truck-to-rail transfers — I’m going to just take a minute to talk about that — we do mechanical services; and we do rail services. We’re a shortline, but we’re very entrepreneurial. We, in fact, do track work for the Class I railways, like CN and CP. We do our own infrastructure work. So we get to see a lot of different conditions and situations that take place in the industry.
From a capital-asset investment standpoint to help reduce greenhouse gases, something we’ve done is taken on these locomotives — we call them mothers/daughters; it’s like a slug unit where a locomotive can actually produce enough electric power to run another second unit. We call it the “daughter” unit. They have been quite successful in yard-switching terminal operations, and we see savings in fuel of up to 60%. That’s very significant for us as a smaller company, but it also helps the environment.
All of our locomotives have APUs — auxiliary power units — and AESS, or automatic engine start and shutdown technology. The latest thing we’re getting into is what we call rail movers. Those are smaller units — much smaller than a locomotive — but they only burn 20% of the fuel as a locomotive. Those are very good in unique operations for shippers that have smaller groups of cars to move. In fact, the shippers can use them themselves.
So from a capital standpoint on the locomotive side of things, so to speak, we’re always looking at new technology that’s out there. Also, saving fuel not only helps us but the climate.
When it comes to infrastructure upgrades, we have taken a position over the years that we don’t like to just have like-for-like maintenance programs. By that I mean that if part of our railroad has 100-pound rail — meaning that every three feet of a piece of rail weighs 100 pounds, we’ll upgrade it to 115. It’s a little more money, of course, but it’s much more reliable and helps us down the road.
Another big thing, especially as the climate’s been changing, is standard culvert replacement. We never do it like-for-like. In fact, we don’t always rely anymore on the 1-in-100-year storm calculations; we often find ourselves now using the 1-in-125 and sometimes even higher. That’s because we’ve seen the impact it can have on bridge abutments, piers and water streams changing.
Ironically, if I look in the last 10 to 15 years for any issues we’ve had — the biggest issues on our infrastructure — I sometimes point the root cause back to land development, municipalities or even private woodlot owners, for example. Our railroad has been there for more than 150 years, so as development happens around the infrastructure, it’s very important to look at the downstream impacts. If parts of land being clear-cut miles and miles upstream, we can see that impact of all of a sudden ballooning up the riverbeds that then impact the bridges that have been there for 150 years, as I said.
It’s something we watch very closely, and it’s become one of our bigger concern areas.
From a growth standpoint in our business, we take a lot of pride in being small but innovative and creative. A big piece of our growth is actually truck-to-rail transloads. It could be lumber coming from Newfoundland, and instead of being trucked all the way from Newfoundland to somewhere in the United States or another point in Canada, truckers will truck it to our facilities. We move everything from lumber, pulp and paper, forestry products, manufacturing goods, steel, rock ballast and even cooking oil coming halfway across the country. Then we transload it into trucks to get trucked over to french fry plants in Prince Edward Island, for example.
So there are a lot of unique opportunities, but it helps the rural shippers of not just Atlantic Canada but Canada in general, who may not be served by rail, or could be served by one of the Class I railways that are not being as competitive as the shipper would like. We will truck it to our facility and again be able to branch it out to CN, CP or Pan Am, or the future CSX as an option.
Again, it saves greenhouse gas emissions because rail is much more climate friendly than trucks. It’s harder to get long-haul truck drivers, so it also gives truckers the ability to be closer to home. They may be home every night or every second night and still do the thing they love and stay in the business they are in.
To put it into perspective, last year we transloaded over 14,000 trucks onto railcars. Every time we do that, we’re making that shipper —
The Chair: Mr. Simpson, I hate to cut you off, but if you could wrap up your presentation for the benefit of time, there are a number of senators who want to ask questions.
Mr. Simpson: I understand. I’ll bring this to a conclusion.
The last point would be intermodal. Again, it goes back to Port Saint John. We will grow that business from about 15,000 intermodal lifts last year to almost 100,000 containers, and that could double again next year.
The last point I would make is that if there are opportunities for funding from the government, the United States does a great job in terms of having federal and state programs to help the railway industry and shippers. A lot of them are cost-share or tax credits and that goes into the infrastructure. I’ll leave it at that. Thank you very much for your time.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Simpson.
Senator Cormier: Mr. Simpson, thank you for your presentation. I’m from northern New Brunswick and I didn’t know about the existence of this infrastructure. I’m very proud to hear about it.
Since we’re doing a study on the adaptability of infrastructure in terms of the impact of climate change, I want to know what your main challenges are in terms of your infrastructure. I’m seeing all the tracks there and I’m wondering what are the main challenges and how you adapt. How do you ensure that your infrastructure is more resilient? You spoke a bit about that, but I would like to hear more.
Ms. Healey, my colleague spoke about collaboration with the government. You signed a protocol, and the new plan from the government says you’ll have a new protocol starting with reviews in 2023 and again in 2027. I wonder what the priorities should be in that protocol; is that the right tool for good collaboration between the government and your association?
Mr. Simpson: Thank you, Senator Cormier. It’s nice to see a New Brunswick face.
You can imagine, even though we’re 800 kilometres, we do cross over from northern Maine into Saint-Léonard, New Brunswick. Our railroad meanders around the Saint John riverbanks. The winters are much harsher there than in Saint John.
From a climate standpoint, we get severe winters up there, so snow clearing and ice in the Saint John River. A lot of work is being done right now with the State of Maine helping us with funding and so on to preserve the riverbanks from being eroded away and literally taking the railbed with it. CN has the same problem on the Canadian side of the Saint John River. While that is happening, a snowstorm could be severe in that part of the country. In Saint John, we could have a lot of ice and a totally different climate.
The thing that concerns me the most is when we get the big rainstorms. When you get the 100- or 150-millimetre rainstorms in a short period of time, that tends to have the biggest and toughest impact on rail infrastructure. We saw this with CP and CN in British Columbia earlier in the year. That’s the thing we have to protect against to make sure that everything feeding into the railroad infrastructure is in good shape and can handle the extreme flooding situation that takes place. The water is going to find its nearest path and hopefully it doesn’t take out part of your infrastructure.
Senator Cormier: Thank you. Ms. Healey or Mr. Kolz?
Ms. Healey: In terms of protocol, I think you’re referencing the GHG offset protocol, right?
Senator Cormier: I’m referring to the Memorandum of Understanding between Transport Canada and the Railway Association of Canada for Reducing Locomotive Emissions. That comes to term in December 2022. Then you have the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan. The government says it will review the plan’s progress between 2023 and 2027. I’m wondering what your priorities are and if they match the government’s objectives. Are you on the same page with the government on this?
Ms. Healey: As an industry, given our strong environmental record, we strongly encourage the modal shift for both transportation of goods and people, so to shift from trucking to rail and from cars to commuter services. This is one thing we’re focusing on and this is the message we convey to various stakeholders. As an example, if we shifted to rail only 10% of what is currently transported by trucks, we would save more than four megatonnes of GHGs.
As mentioned earlier, even though rail accounts for a small fraction of the GHG emissions of the transportation sector, our members invested a lot over the years in technology innovation to decarbonize rail with hydrogen fuel cell locomotives, for example, and higher renewable fuel blend rates.
We realize that these technologies are not always commercially viable, so the RAC recommends that the federal government create a robust funding program to support research, development and deployment of low-carbon to net-zero technology in the Canadian rail sector. We just issued a white paper on the subject that we would be pleased to share with you.
Along the same line of thought, even though we’re a green solution and our infrastructure is now more than ever exposed to disruptions caused by natural disasters, we also recommend that more funding programs be available to support rail infrastructure. The National Trade Corridors Fund is a great example. Dedicated funding programs to short-line railways, as mentioned by our colleagues, are also needed, like what is being done in the U.S.
Senator Cormier: Thank you.
Senator Sorensen: Ms. Healey has done a good job of answering my question. I’ll just take it down to a finer point.
Certainly, the GHG reduction in the last 30 years is impressive — 44.6% since 1990. I was going to ask you to comment on current research and efforts to continue to move that forward. You have already made reference to a couple of those. If you have anything to add, that would be great.
I’m also interested to know whether a specific goal is set for future years that you’re working towards. Perhaps even more specifically, if you look at your levels in 2005, do you anticipate reducing that by 40% by 2030, which is sort of a high-level goal of GHG emissions overall in the country?
Ms. Healey: The reduction of GHG emissions is a continuous effort. Just in terms of the environment, the RAC and its environment committee have been active lately. There are seven initiatives going on at the moment in which we are active participants, some of which include renewable fuels research, Advanced Biofuels Canada, environment management systems, glyphosate monitoring et cetera. For the sake of time, I won’t go into details here.
What we’re trying to do is meet with all levels of governments and keep presenting ourselves as an ally. We’re here, as we mentioned earlier, to help with a modal shift. We represent only 3.5% of total GHG emissions for the transportation sector. We are here to help governments meet their own targets. We present ourselves as an ally in the reduction of GHG emissions.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you.
Senator Simons: I wanted to ask about how we get to the point where we are doing solid risk management on our main line railways.
Like many Albertans, I was shocked when the Port of Vancouver and the city of Vancouver were completely cut off both from road and rail. The idea that such an important economic corridor could be completely shut down shattered a lot of people’s complacency.
My question is for the Railway Association of Canada: What kind of work is being done to do cutting edge risk assessment to know where the vulnerabilities in our main lines are? How can we protect them from similar disasters?
Mr. Kolz: Thank you for the question. Frankly, what we saw in response to the disasters in B.C. and the speediness of the response are testaments to the extreme weather plans the railways have developed and continue to develop. There were a lot of lessons learned from what happened last fall, but there is also pride taken in the fact that those lines were re-established in just over a week when there were predictions that it could take months.
Senator Simons: That is impressive. My question is: What are we doing to make sure we don’t need extreme weather plans? What are we doing to weatherproof those lines so we don’t have those disruptions?
Mr. Kolz: To be honest, I’m not sure you can make them completely weatherproof. I think the best you can hope for is to mitigate the risk by having a plan, to be able to respond quickly and to ensure that there is cooperation among different levels of government and first responders by keeping that dialogue open and not working in silos.
A lot of the weather we have seen in the last number of months and years could never have been predicted, so you can’t necessarily be ready for something you don’t know is going to happen, but whether it’s fires, floods, washouts, et cetera, these railways are working day and night to ensure they are ready for these events. Whether it’s the transportation of dangerous goods or non-weather-related disruptions, there is a plan for every plan. Again, last fall, it was executed quite well, but it is a collaborative effort. The railways take a lot of responsibility for maintaining their tracks and ensuring plans are in place. It’s not done in isolation.
Innovation, making sure that regulations are suitable to be able to respond quickly and reducing red tape — these are things you have heard about from other sectors of the transport industry as well, but railways, particularly throughout the pandemic, have kept their heads down and gone about their business. In February of 2020, we were dealing with rail blockades, and by mid-March 2020, we were dealing with COVID. There wasn’t even an assurance that railways would be able to continue to transport goods and people between provinces or internationally to the U.S.
Thankfully, they have been able to persevere through all of those things. I’m not sure there would ever have been a plan in place for a global pandemic, for instance, when it came to maintaining the viability of the supply chain. Our railways are nothing if not nimble. They invest a whole lot of money and effort into innovation. They count on the cooperation of and the collaboration with various levels of government and other stakeholders, and the RAC tries to make those partnerships happen.
Ms. Healey: If I may add to that, a railway is part of a transportation network. A good example of that collaboration is our involvement with plenty of other key players within the supply chain. The service contingency plan initiative hosted by Transport Canada gathers together supply chain stakeholders with the objective to work together to come up with an all-industry supply chain emergency response plan, and this is under way as we speak.
Senator Simons: My frustration remains that it’s all about the response after the fact and not about the risk assessment necessary to mitigate beforehand.
Mr. Kolz: Certainly, when it comes to mitigating the weather and the climate change issue in particular, I do think that the railways are leading that charge. The fact is that we are best in class for emissions and that we’re looking at alternative fuel sources such as electrification. You have no doubt heard about the high frequency rail project that VIA is working on, which will also free up the supply chain by having dedicated track. These are both short-term concerns and long-term plans. It shows that they are not just reactive. They are being proactive, but they are trying to be strategic in their approach as well.
Senator Klyne: Like my colleague before me, Senator Simons, I am going to try another approach to get you to open up the playbook on business continuity and plans. I have two questions for the representatives from the Railway Association of Canada and the New Brunswick Southern Railway if Mr. Simpson would like to comment.
Climate change and natural catastrophes have certainly tested business resilience and pushed supply chains to the breaking point. Railroads and truck-to-rail cars are the lifelines for many businesses getting their goods to market. A recent strike demonstrated the importance of railroads to Canada’s economy and to Canadians wanting to avoid disruptions to this critical infrastructure.
Now, I have to assume that railroads, like other businesses, have adopted new technologies in their railway operations to keep things running at track speed. My first question is about disruptions. What measures are taken to avoid a crippling cyberattack or cyber incident? What measures are being taken to ensure business continuity during critical blackouts or failures, including power disruptions or disruptions due to aging bridges, dams and rail tracks?
My second question is: What can the federal government do to better support Canada’s railway system in light of the fact that significant climate events are projected to become more common in the decades to come?
Ms. Healey: In terms of cybersecurity, the industry’s security committee and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security have identified rail as being vulnerable to cyberattacks, especially given that it is a critical infrastructure. In addition to what is already being done at the railway level, a subcommittee of railway representatives and experts has been created, and we’re taking that seriously.
When it comes to telecommunications or spectrum infrastructure, we indeed realize that more frequent occurrences of extreme weather events, such as ice storms or floods, are causing interruptions to communications infrastructure, resulting in outages and disruptions, ultimately, to the movement of goods. During an emergency, communications infrastructure is needed for emergency services to respond and for transportation committees to continue to operate. Keeping that in mind, railways have developed business resumption plans to address outages that would affect the core of their networks. These are typically exercised twice a year, and individual outages are handled on a case-by-case basis.
It is worth noting that there is much redundancy in the network. By that we mean overlapping coverage from radio bases and alternate routes for fibre in the event of a fibre cut. That minimizes the impact of any single outage having a major impact on the network.
Mr. Kolz: I would also add that in our pre-budget submission that was submitted several months ago in anticipation of the budget that will be announced tomorrow, the number one recommendation that we made on behalf of our members was boosting federal rail safety infrastructure spending, whether that’s through the Rail Safety Improvement Program or the National Trade Corridors Fund that Caroline alluded to earlier.
Most of what railways are looking for — particularly shortlines, I may add — is funding that will allow them to develop projects that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. You mentioned bridges, for instance, and storage facilities.
Generally speaking, railways do an excellent job of maintaining their track and their infrastructure, but the ability to expand, improve or enhance, particularly among our smaller members, is often challenged by a lack of infrastructure funding. It’s not even necessarily a matter of the government increasing the amount of funding. It’s ensuring that the shortlines have access to the funding that has been earmarked.
There are big projects that our Class I railways and VIA would be interested in pursuing, but there are perhaps smaller projects that are equally important that our shortlines are looking to pursue, and they need access to those funds as well.
Mr. Simpson: It’s an excellent question. Even though we’re a shortline, we’re fortunate to be owned by J.D. Irving, and as a railroad, we get to adapt and be part of some of the learning as a larger organization.
Last year, we had a number of internal and organization-wide business continuity plan mock-ups that we did. We all had to put a plan together on how we would operate in a world where a cyberattack hit either the railroad or one of the J.D. Irving companies or the whole organization. How would we operate? How would we communicate with customers? How would we keep the lights on and keep running the business?
We now do those twice a year. They get more and more challenging because the set of circumstances thrown at us becomes more and more difficult, but it’s a great way to practise.
Last year, we did a mock disaster. Within our organization, the railroad was the first “guinea pig.” Unbeknownst to us, there was a situation that happened that was quite severe. We got the call, and we had to adapt to it. It really set us up on how we would run the business in the event of some catastrophic event taking place.
All of these things are doable, and they are very important. It doesn’t matter about the size of your operation. It’s ways to mitigate future risk.
Another thing we do is to be less reactive and more proactive. I think all the railways do that. We learn from every event.
When we know there is a storm or a weather system coming, we’re out days in advance preparing. It’s all hands on deck as we’re going through it, and then there is a post-op afterwards to find out where we were vulnerable. Where did we get lucky? Where were we exposed? And we build that into our program the next time.
Dealing with disruption and car supply, those are all great questions. This year in particular, especially in the boxcar market and the centrebeam market, all of a sudden goods got hung up and shippers couldn’t get access to railcars.
We have taken a proactive approach over the years, and we don’t rely on the other railroads and the Class I railroads to supply those. We have huge fleets ourselves.
Finally, when I talked about having access to CN, CP and CSX, we leverage them all. It’s very important that, if something happens or if one of those rail suppliers aren’t performing the way the shippers would like, we have another way to move our goods.
Senator Quinn: Thank you to the witnesses. Those were very informative presentations.
There is no question that railways play an important role in our transportation system, not only in Canada but throughout North America. I think Mr. Simpson outlined the thousands of jobs that are generated because of the railway, the impact on our economy and our gross domestic product.
This committee is looking at critical infrastructure and climate change, but I want to pursue what Senator Simons and Senator Klyne were getting at.
In my case, I guess the cat is out of the bag. I used to run a port. Ports are key to the movement of goods in and out of North America, but the railways are the web, if you will, that criss-crosses Canada, North America and now down into Mexico.
How is it that we can look at that web so that when something does happen, what work is done in advance? What predictive analysis can take place? What are the weather patterns? We know we have rising sea levels. We know we have heavier weather events in various areas of the country. It seems to get more and more dramatic in certain areas.
I’m wondering if a predictive analysis would come back to the theme of cooperative operations that would allow pre-planning, if you will, that a cargo that can’t get to Vancouver can head east and get to Montreal, for example. I’m wondering if in Mr. Simpson’s case, where we happen to connect as a country with three Class I North American railways, that whole idea of resiliency has to be based not on business resumption planning but emergency preparedness planning. That is my colleague’s point.
I am wondering if each of you would comment on that, and then I have a short second question.
Mr. Simpson: Thank you, Senator Quinn. I would be happy to start it off.
The predictive analysis is very important. Don’t just have an event and get through it. We really need to keep learning from each other, and maybe collectively. Maybe what you’re hitting on there is we as an industry should lean on each other more.
What were the events of last year? What were the events of the past decade? How did we get through that? I’ll let my colleagues at the Railway Association of Canada answer, because that could be a great opportunity that we could leverage among ourselves. We tend to keep things in-house as a lot of industries do, and that could be one big opportunity.
Having alternate routes is critical. Not everyone is as fortunate as we are from a geographic standpoint, but we do need to have contingency plans so that if something happens, the goods can keep flowing and customers can keep getting looked after.
The last thing that we’re exploring right now is the use of LiDAR and being able to see a colleague from northern Manitoba talking about the ice being two feet deep and things like that. There is a lot we can learn from LiDAR technology and flyovers, not just of our railbed but also the terrain around it. That gives us some clues on where infrastructure is vulnerable. Those are all some things that we’re chasing.
Mr. Kolz: To pick up on that, I would say that one of the things that people may or may not be aware of when it comes to the railways in Canada is just how much they cooperate and collaborate with one another, and also with governmental organizations like the National Research Council and universities across the country. There are partnerships that exist and perhaps we need to do a better job of highlighting or sharing with the general public. Railways do take responsibility for their networks, but they can’t do it all on their own.
We have seen made-in-Canada innovations that are now being adopted in other parts of the world, whether it’s cold wheel technology, or the ability to operate in extreme conditions on both sides of the temperature ledger, or extreme heat or frigid cold weather. There is a lot of collaboration going on.
Frankly, to the untrained eye, a lot of people would say that the rail industry is an old-fashioned industry. We think back to the days of the Last Spike or something like that.
But it is incredibly innovative and cutting edge. The technology is mind boggling. So many of the efforts they are putting into this are with environmental concerns in mind, as well as efficiencies and working within the system they have.
There was some mention earlier about how, in the States, there are programs specifically designed to incentivize further technological advances or —
The Chair: Mr. Kolz, I have to interrupt.
I want to thank Ms. Healey, Mr. Kolz, Mr. Affleck and Mr. Simpson for being before the committee. You gave great testimony and responded to great questions, so much so that, unfortunately, we ran out of time. Senator Dasko and I are in the batters’ box, but we need to introduce our next panellists. Thank you again, and we will be speaking with you very soon.
Senators, our next witnesses are from the Canadian Rail Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta. We welcome Michael Hendry, Director; and Paul Miller, Railroader in Residence. Welcome to all, and thank you for joining us.
I will invite Mr. Hendry to begin with his opening remarks. Each of you has no more than 15 minutes, because we’d really like to dive into questions and answers from senators. Thank you.
Michael Hendry, Director, Canadian Rail Research Laboratory, University of Alberta, as an individual: Thank you, Mr. Chair and senators, for the opportunity to discuss this topic with you.
I’ll provide my observations on the impact of climate change on critical railway infrastructure. My colleague, Paul Miller, will then discuss the implications for supply chains.
Our research at the Canadian Rail Research Laboratory has allowed us to work closely with the railway industry, primarily CN and CP, on topics ranging from infrastructure performance, rail seal integrity and mechanical reliability through to things like human factors and network optimization. This work is often being conducted in the Canadian context, which is primarily differentiated from the U.S. context by the effect of geography and climate, although sometimes a bit on policy as well.
From this experience, the most evident effect of climate change has been the increased frequency of natural or ground hazards, which impact railway infrastructure. We define ground hazards as rock falls, debris flows, landslides, rock slides, embankment subsidence or washouts, all of which can result in a loss of track or pose a risk to safe rail operations.
The rate of occurrence of hazards within a region and the events that trigger ground hazards are often a result of local meteorological and climate conditions, so they are quite sensitive to any sort of change in climate.
The impacts of ground hazards have been extensively studied — and I think this answers some of the questions from the previous session — through the Railway Ground Hazard Research Program, or RGHRP, which was founded in 2003 as a collaboration between Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, the University of Alberta and Queen’s University. It’s also supported by Transport Canada and the Geological Survey of Canada.
The RGHRP conducts scientific research and investigations to better understand the mechanisms that cause various ground hazards, develop guidelines to manage the risks, and develop and identify tools and technologies to mitigate the hazards.
I can give a clear example of some of the studies we’ve been working on. It gives a really good example of a potential for a ground hazard to severely impact the Canadian railway network. It was the Ripley landslide. The Ripley landslide is within the Thompson Valley, adjacent to the Thompson River, just south of the town of Ashcroft, British Columbia. That is in the area where we have shared running rights between CN and CP. That is 1 million cubic metres of soil, and it’s a landslide. It’s the smallest of the 12 landslides in the area, but it’s by far the most active. It’s been subject to intense monitoring and study over the past decade, and is currently moving at an average annual rate of 120 millimetres per year.
It has accelerated seasonally, and in some cases, we’ve seen jumps in movements. The key thing about this particular landslide — and there are lots in Canada — is that both CN and CP run across it. If it were to start accelerating rapidly, which has happened to other landslides in that area, it would effectively cut off rail transport between Vancouver and the rest of the country.
The last landslide in that area was the Goddard landslide in 1982, which severed CP’s main line for weeks. The first one we knew about within this area was in 1898, and that failed and cut off CP for months.
The example of the Ripley landslide is presented to highlight the precariousness of our transportation network and some of the extremely challenging terrain through which it passes. There are often very few redundant routes, especially when we start going through the mountains or northern Ontario, and a relatively short impassable section of track can result in the severing of an important national transportation corridor.
Another concerning trend is the apparent increase of severe weather events that trigger multiple ground hazards. I’ll bring this to a slightly older event, which is the 2013 floods in Alberta. That resulted from a precipitation event far more significant than what the transportation infrastructure was designed to withstand. That’s because it was far greater than anything that was on our current records. It resulted in severe damage of surface transportation routes. There were, particularly, 403 locations where ground hazards impacted the surface transportation infrastructure. Massive washouts — you name it — we pretty much had to deal with it in southern Alberta.
The key thing that’s really notable about those 403 ground hazards that were triggered is that 106 were what we call debris flows. Debris flows are rapid movements of material down a slope. The significant part about this is that there were no records of any of those types of occurrences happening in that area of the province before.
It was essentially a new type of hazard for that area that wasn’t part of any sort of previous assessments, monitoring or anything.
The other more recent example that has been mentioned a few times was the flooding in southwestern British Columbia in November of last year. The damage was extensive and occurred within a region very dense with nationally important transportation routes. Now we have a term, “atmospheric river,” that is now very widely recognized from media reports.
I have a colleague, Tim Keegan, who works with the RGHRP as well. He’s been investigating and discussing atmospheric rivers for more than a decade. They just hadn’t made it into public parlance until more recently. He has documented that seven of these events have occurred within British Columbia between 2017 and 2021, which is a very short time period within which a lot has happened. None of them has been as impactful, partially because of the existing conditions, such as snowpack and other conditions that make these conditions much worse, as well as the location at which they have occurred. The 2021 case was definitely at a very high-impact location. It’s very unlikely that this will be the last occurrence that we witness.
Just from those two cases — and quite a few other cases — we’ve learned that we must now design infrastructure for hazard types that may not have been previously observed within a region. Those hazards and multiple other hazards can be triggered by climatic events that have a severity in excess of any that have occurred within living memory or living history. Additionally, those severe climatic events appear to be happening more frequently.
So we’ve got a very challenging situation, both for the infrastructure owners and the public.
I have just put a few thoughts down on how to go forward. These are just my thoughts; I haven’t vetted them through the wider scientific community or anything, so take them as they are.
First, improvements in monitoring and mitigation of ground hazards arise from new technologies. Primarily, we’ve been focusing on ones that allow for an identification of ground hazards on a wider scale and provide data for assessing those hazards once they are found. We need to assess them to figure out how we mitigate them, how we minimize their impacts.
Some of the examples of remote sensing technologies have already been mentioned; one is LiDAR. We’ve used LiDAR extensively over the past decade, and it has been rapidly developed over the past decade or so to today’s widespread usage and is something that, as geotechnical engineers, we use quite often to assess any sort of site.
More recently, we’re starting to delve into space-based InSAR. This is expanding our capabilities to look for ground movements from local sites, individual point locations and now taking that up to huge swaths of territory — huge fractions of provinces, essentially, where we can now monitor for millimetres of movement.
Developing our understanding and increasing the number of available tools requires continued investment in research related to ground hazards through programs like the RGHRP. I believe that the RGHRP is a great program for railways, and it should perhaps be replicated or expanded to other modes of transport. I think there are a lot of other groups that could definitely use the collaboration that we’re seeing between our major players and our industry members of the RGHRP.
Second, I would suggest that past severe weather events should be assessed as stress tests. We have stress tests for banks, and now we’re seeing stress tests on our transportation infrastructure. Whenever we have one of these events, every effort should be made to document these events very clearly. We should be focusing on what infrastructure failed, why it failed and how long it took to put back into service. This can allow for the identification and prioritization of infrastructure to harden against such events or at least for the preparation and stockpiling of materials to facilitate a faster return to service.
For the 2013 floods, we undertook such a documentation exercise in collaboration with Alberta’s Ministry of Transportation and Canadian Pacific. We had students and people talking with the engineers that were on-site to identify what happened and what it took to get back into service, and put that into a database so it can be accessed now.
Similar documentation has started in British Columbia. I’m not sure of the extent yet. I haven’t had much interaction with those persons that are involved with that.
Finally, I would say the design requirements for infrastructure owners have changed because of severe weather events and changing climate conditions. The example of culverts was mentioned earlier. Yes, they are upsizing culverts everywhere and including much higher flow rates in all designs. Thus, infrastructure renewal slowly leads to adaptation to climate change.
It is very easy to find exceptional cost estimates for the adaptation of the remaining infrastructure to ensure survivability against the worst predicted scenarios. Estimates of the dollar values are often seen to be not feasible. They are very high, so not feasible expenditures. Instead, I’d suggest — and this is just a suggestion from me — that we focus on identifying assets exposed to hazards that cannot rapidly be reconstructed — for example, longer-span bridges — and these should be ranked for improvement based on risk assessments. And by “improvement” I mean hardening and making sure that they are more survivable in the case of severe weather events.
Paul Miller, Railroader in Residence, Canadian Rail Research Laboratory, University of Alberta, as an individual: Thank you, Michael, and thank you, honourable chair and senators, for your interest in this very important topic. I can be very brief due to the excellence of the previous presentations and the questions that have been asked.
I’ll approach climate impacts on infrastructure from a supply chain perspective. Generally, there are three main themes affecting railroads and their supply chain partners when it comes to climate.
First, of course, is traffic availability, and we need look no further than the Canadian Prairies to see a significant drought impact on the amount of export grain that we have available for movement to Vancouver, Prince Rupert and other ports. So it affects the traffic availability.
Second — and this has been addressed by a number of the previous speakers — emissions reductions within rail operations, and especially in locomotive diesel fuel consumption, is the source of about 85% of railway Scope 1 emissions. Again, a number of examples have been given. A few others are trip optimizer, which is a type of cruise control for trains; horsepower-per-tonne matching; and the rigorous application of data analytics.
Then the third theme, I guess, and most importantly for your study, is the impacts on infrastructure. By speaking about rail-based supply chains, I hope to leave you with an interest in applying a supply chain or logistics lens when you’re considering policy recommendations.
And if I can leave you with one foundational perspective, it would simply be this: Supply chains are systems, and therefore, the laws, attributes and considerations of systems dynamics apply. There are a great number of them, but here are several that I find helpful when analyzing supply chain issues or opportunities for improvement.
The first is that system performance is a function of both system design but also the collective behaviour of system participants. Behaviour speaks to transparency, information sharing, shared information systems, shared performance indicators and, most importantly, I think, an earned culture of trust and no surprises.
System design speaks to balanced capabilities, and I believe it was Ian Simpson who spoke about the need to have infrastructure capacities grow in step function — so things like efficient handoffs, matched operating protocols and — this is of particular concern here — things like 24/7 operations.
The second theme that I think is helpful in analyzing supply chains is that the proper goal must be identified up front and agreed upon by all supply chain participants. As a quick example, again going back to grain coming off the Canadian Prairies, the goal isn’t to load 11,000 grain hoppers per week; the goal is to dispatch 900,000 tonnes of Canadian grain from the ports to their eventual customers. By having that goal properly set, it brings into focus all of the actions, assets and efforts of the various supply chain partners, be it the producers themselves; the railways, of course; but also the steamship line operators, the port terminal operators and so on.
Finally, supply chain performance improvement comes from relentlessly attacking what are considered the two twin evils of systems dynamics, and those are constraints and variability. It’s also important while you’re doing that to look for system-wide optimization as opposed to locally optimizing your own little part of the supply chain. We find that when someone is focused on their own costs, for example, of their part of the supply chain that total system throughput tends to suffer.
So all that brings us to the climate impacts on supply chain performance, and there’s no need to go back into it, but we’ve had some very dramatic and very real-world examples of that in British Columbia over the past year.
These are constraints — supply chain constraints, systems dynamics constraints — of the highest order. Lower-level impacts, say the temporary outage of an export terminal due to surprisingly high winds or high rains, inject considerable variability into individual supply chains.
So what can be done? A primary goal must be increased supply chain resilience, and Michael has spoken about that, and other speakers have as well. That speaks to risk assessment, as Senator Simons and others have raised. It speaks to infrastructure planning and hardening once you’ve done those detailed risk assessments.
Another fundamental source of resilience is optionality, and here we’re speaking about a move away from just-in-time logistics, which we’ve all heard about, and a move towards just in case because we’ve seen ample examples over the past few years of what can happen.
Optionality should be a central component of risk management as, again, Senator Simons mentioned, for all supply chain participants. And resilience in the supply chain really flows from designing, building and periodically testing route, intermodal and source options, and I’ll address all three just very briefly.
Route optionality certainly speaks to infrastructure and to your study. Current examples include the Port of Prince Rupert as an option to Vancouver; the Port of Churchill, as my friend Mr. Affleck discussed; and, of course, Port Saint John, New Brunswick, as Ian Simpson and his railroad, NBSR, is certainly very much involved in the developments there.
Another example is improvements to the Prairie North Lines of both CN and CP that have been carried out over the past few years as an alternative to take over during an outage on their respective main lines.
From a policy creation and policy implementation point of view, the corridor-wide approaches and the full-supply-chain approaches that were taken in the Roberts Bank Rail Corridor Program — and also, more recently, in the National Trade Corridors Fund — have been very appropriate and effective.
A second source of optionality, if you will, is intermodal operations. Again, my friend Ian Simpson spoke to this when he talked about truck-to-rail transloading and the number of examples he has going there. This type of thinking can be very effective, particularly in a secondary line or branch line situation where perhaps the railroad has gone out, but the highway remains in place. So you can provide service to the supply chain participants, shippers or consignees, via intermodal service.
The third is probably a bit beyond the scope of your current study and my remarks. These are source options, the notion of shrinking supply chains — onshoring, nearshoring; you’ve all heard these terms — and, as part of that, accessing multiple vendors and customers, which automatically gives you route optionality; you can move between one or the other when a route becomes impacted by a climate event.
Senators, I hope you find some of this information on the nature of supply chains to be useful in your deliberations. I encourage you to apply an end-to-end supply chain, systems-dynamics lens when you’re looking at policy options and recommendations from the study. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Miller and Mr. Hendry.
Senator Dasko: I don’t have any questions at this time, but I really appreciated the presentations. Thank you very much.
The Chair: I have a question for both gentlemen in relation to the railway industry.
Can you provide your assessment as to how well the federal and provincial governments are doing currently in terms of being prepared for extreme weather events? Could you speak to us a bit about integrating disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation in prevention and how well coordinated the provincial and federal governments are, from your perspective?
Mr. Hendry: I haven’t observed much, to be honest. That could just be because I’m not in the right room, so I don’t want to say that it’s zero or that it’s not happening.
Mr. Miller: By way of anecdote, senator — and this speaks to Senator Simon’s point about reactive versus proactive, unfortunately — we saw tremendous collaboration in the recovery efforts in British Columbia. An example that a gentleman from CP gave me was a blasting permit that would normally take weeks or months to obtain was obtained in 40 minutes, and it involved both the provincial and federal governments.
On the reactive side, it’s outstanding. I must share Dr. Hendry’s perspective. I’ve not been in the room for discussions around the proactive side of it, so I could not give you a useful answer, I’m afraid.
The Chair: In terms of extreme weather impact over the decades ahead, can you speak to us about what kind of investment in infrastructure would be required by the railway industry? Are we prepared for that? Is the railway industry prepared for that inevitability? Will they be able to handle it? Will they require help? Could you comment on that?
Mr. Miller: Certainly, from a CN and CP perspective, it’s well recognized. Risk assessments are being undertaken. As part of the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Regulations, I believe it is required that corridor risk assessments be undertaken and kept current.
Dr. Hendry referred to this in his remarks. The level of investment is, frankly, very difficult.
CN and CP both have ongoing programs of capital investment in terms of rock and slope stabilization, improving bridges and so on. Perhaps Dr. Hendry knows, but I don’t know if they’ve done a global analysis of what it would take to make us ready for what we now know aren’t black swan events. We know they are coming; we just don’t know exactly what they will look like.
Mr. Hendry: The big trouble we have — not just the railways, but engineers or anyone designing or assessing anything — is that we have climate models that are getting better, but they usually happen on a regional scale. They don’t happen on a very small scale that you require for a very small watershed. Maybe on the larger watersheds, sure.
So trying to determine what the future will look like based on climate change is very difficult. We have heard mention of the past ways of designing things based on a 1-in-100-year storm or a 1-in-200-year storm. We’ve always struggled with this, especially in Western Canada, where records might go back 80 years and we’re trying to determine what a 1-in-100-year storm is. Well, you’re estimating. Now, with a changing climate, I’m not sure what it would be or how to determine that.
There are a lot of smart people working on trying to come up with guidance. But on a broad scale, trying to predict everything on a network and how it might change, is perhaps beyond us at this point.
Senator Simons: Thank you very much, Dr. Hendry and Mr. Miller, for being here. I feel like the kid who brought the best things for show and tell. I’m really glad that you’re here representing the University of Alberta.
Dr. Hendry, it was interesting to hear you speak about landslides, which I’ve always thought of as a kind of one-off thing; it happens and it’s done. But you were describing a landslide as something that happens slowly and gradually, maybe over the course of many years, which is not how I’ve thought of the term before.
When you have areas that are vulnerable to landslides, such as the ones you are describing, which we can watch happening in slow motion, is it possible to stop the landslide in its tracks or to stop it before it starts? If so, is that the responsibility of the railway at the bottom of the hill or is that the responsibility of the provincial or federal Crown that might own that slide face?
Mr. Hendry: It is definitely possible to improve a landslide. Sometimes we can stop them and sometimes we can slow them down enough that it doesn’t impact operations. I teach a class on this interesting topic. It is something that can be done, but costs go up exponentially with the size of the landslide, so that is a concern.
The other problem is in terms of who owns the risk. Who will be impacted the most is the one who has the obligation to fix it.
I mentioned the 1982 Goddard landslide in the Ashcroft valley. That went all the way to the Supreme Court. One railway was trying to sue farmers in the area that were using a particular type of irrigation, which they blamed for increasing moisture content and generating the failure of the Goddard landslide. It’s hard to demonstrate causality for such a natural event because there are so many variables involved. It’s hard to say who is ultimately responsible for the event occurring. The one to whom it means the most to fix it is always the one who takes on the lion’s share of the costs.
Senator Simons: Even if the rock face that’s sliding belongs to the Crown, it’s the person at the bottom of the hill who will face the greatest disaster, if it happens, and the one who is responsible for funding?
Mr. Hendry: Yes. There were discussions about land that was allocated to the railways when they pushed through at the turn of the last century. There were cases where the amount of land allocated to them was quite large in some sections, and that was to account for slopes above the railways. That was an effort to try to give them control over the slopes that would impact operations.
Senator Simons: Mr. Miller, when we’re talking about having options so that there’s not just one line that we’re wedded to — you are a former CN executive — where do you think the responsibility should be to invest in the capital to say we’d better have a back-up line? We’d better have an alternative line so that we have that capacity in the system? Should that be coming from the Crown? Should that be coming from CN and CP together? Who should make sure that we have that functionality?
Mr. Miller: It’s a terrific question. And it is just very difficult in certain areas, British Columbia being the prime example in Canada, of course, to even think about constructing that third option line.
CN and CP, as I believe Mr. Hendry mentioned, do cooperate with joint running rights through the Thompson and Fraser River Canyons. That helps quite a bit.
There is the former B.C. rail corridor, for example. It is a very limited capacity. And certainly even if you combine the capacity of the Port of Prince Rupert, which uses the B.C. north line, and the Vancouver capacity of the B.C. rail corridor, you do not come close to matching the throughput capacity of the CN and CP mains, unsurprisingly.
This is just a personal opinion. I’m a big fan of support for shortlines. I’m a big fan of government support for passenger and commuter operators. And I’m a fan of government support to things like the National Trade Corridors Fund when you can demonstrate a clear public benefit.
An example, and it does speak to resiliency, is grade separations, taking out the grade crossings that are a source of delay, collisions, human loss and suffering. Things like that, I would fully support.
Investing pure railway dollars in CN and CP, I’m not sure. I think CN and CP are very financially successful for a lot of great reasons. I think they have got considerable capacity. But to build a whole new railroad at tens of millions of dollars a mile through the Rockies and through those canyons is just going to be tough, senator, no matter who takes it on, no matter who has the responsibility.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Miller.
Senator Sorensen: Thank you very much. Welcome to both of you also from my home province of Alberta. Nice to see you with us.
Of course, my community of Banff was significantly impacted by the floods of 2013. That said, I wanted to talk about communities and derailments.
Banff had a derailment in 2015. It was many hours before we knew what was in the cars. At the end of the day, it was lentils, which was good news. Parks Canada was still very concerned. It could have been much worse for the Bow River and for our communities.
I’m curious to know what causes derailments. I’m sure it’s probably a varied answer across the country and all kinds of things could cause them. But on the topic of climate change, is there any data to suggest what percentage of derailments are caused by climate change activity?
I will turn that over to you. I do have to say, Mr. Miller, on behalf of the environment, I agree with you; let’s get those passenger trains rolling in Alberta, east and west, north and south.
Mr. Miller: Thank you, senator. I’ll take a run at it and see what Dr. Hendry may wish to add.
To the first part of your question about what causes derailments, it is roughly evenly split. The first two main causes are infrastructure issues, a simple example being a broken rail; or rolling stock issues, a simple example being a broken wheel.
Third, after those, probably would be the broad category of human factors. Was the train put together properly? Was the plan for the train developed properly? Was the train being operated properly?
Another cause, however — it speaks to your question and to the study that you have undertaken here — is natural factors which, as Dr. Hendry and others have pointed out, and as you’re all well aware, are certainly being exacerbated as we move into this continuing period of climate change and, no doubt, accelerating climate change. This is, as Dr. Hendry mentioned, from floods, landslides and a number of things of this nature.
To the Banff derailment, I did read the TSB report, but I don’t recall. It was either a broken rail or something mechanical to do with the car.
Mr. Hendry: We have done a deep dive into the railway occurrence database which is maintained by the Transportation Safety Board. We did it a few years ago in 2016. We have also done it more recently to try and update our background information on it. Far and away, the rail brakes are the highest-frequency cause of derailments. And they also usually happen at higher speeds, so it results in a higher number of cars derailed in a given event.
Number two is track geometry. Track geometry is really hard to demonstrate because, after an accident, the geometry is usually not in good shape anyways.
I think wheel brakes or wheel shelling events is number three or four.
Then there are a few others. The actual occurrences really start getting bunched together as far as frequency when you get down below that.
The Chair: Thank you, gentlemen.
Senator Klyne: Dr. Hendry, from what I understand, your research focuses in part on soil mechanics and on the impact that increasing load sizes have had on our railway infrastructure. I have two questions. Mr. Miller, as a railroader in residence, you are welcome to comment as well.
My interest is around rail bridges built to carry a railway over a road or water, as well as rail track and track beds generally, and the integrity of the original design to support the required bearing capacity and potential for failure due to aging, natural erosion or ground hazards.
First, are there regularly scheduled geotech investigations or checks of bridges and rail track substrate to confirm the integrity is still intact, especially considering increasing load sizes?
My second question is around safety. Which entity is responsible for enforcing regulations and guidelines for acceptable tolerances? Would you be of the opinion that everything meets the required bearing capacity, or is there a cause for concern on certain lines or regions?
Mr. Hendry: For bridge structures, I have had the opportunity to have meals with some of the bridge people from CN and CP in the past. I do know they have a very rigorous inspection process for bridge structures, especially the older ones. They are constantly monitoring them, going to sites and actually investigating them.
Regarding subgrades, I would say it’s a different take. Subgrades and embankment structures are considered to be geological materials. They have a much longer lifespan and they are not going to rust away on you in most cases. So they are treated differently.
So there is a movement towards GAM, which is an awful acronym for geotechnical asset management, which is trying to come up with lifespans for it. Even now it’s still a work in progress.
As far as investigation, a lot of it is based on whether or not you can maintain track geometry. How well does the track maintain it? And if it maintains it, usually it doesn’t get much observation. But if it can’t, then it becomes a problem and then there is some action taken. You can maintain the track on really poor subgrades, it just requires a lot of maintenance effort.
Then also the other thing that comes with the track and the ability to maintain track geometry is you can always create a lower class of track, which means lower speeds to transit that track. And in some cases, in some construction zones, I have seen huge excavations, you know, every second or every two out of three ties removed. They can operate trains very slowly at two to three miles per hour.
There is always a lower limit as to just how good you could go. Most of the time, it’s trying to maintain the flow of traffic. So the onus is on the railway to keep things moving.
As far as track investigation goes, we have mentioned GPR previously. It’s still on identified problems. If you have a problem that is going on and you want to investigate with ground-penetrating radar, that’s possible, but you have to have a reason to do so; it has to be identified as a problem you can’t solve through other ways.
We have worked with CN in the past. We have measured over 12,000 kilometres of track with some really fancy equipment from the U.S. that was measuring subgrade stiffness, which was trying to get at just that capability to start assessing the quality of subgrade infrastructure. We tested that quite extensively on the Lac La Biche subdivision of Fort McMurray when CN was trying to rehabilitate it to take higher loads.
So there are new technologies that are coming out, but we aren’t quite there for getting a clear assessment and the requirements out there for subgrade and embankment structures.
Mr. Miller: To the second part of your question, senator, regarding who is responsible for the standards, it’s the General Director of Rail Safety at Transport Canada. There is legislation, of course — the Railway Safety Act — a number of regulations and then rules. The regulations and rules, as I’m sure you know, all have the force of law behind them. So Transport Canada has that responsibility.
I used to be a vice-president in charge of safety at CN. I did have a very successful working relationship with our colleagues at Transport Canada and the Transportation Safety Board. And it was really built on something I mentioned just briefly in my remarks and that is a culture of earned trust and transparency. When something is wrong, we were able to point out that we made a mistake and have to do better, and here is what we’re doing about what we found.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: I want to start by saying that I’m not an expert and I don’t think I understood everything you said. So I will ask you a more general question: Are we ready? Are the railroads — is the train system around Canada — ready for extreme weather and climate change? I think you alluded that the answer is “not quite,” but you haven’t said it really clearly.
You have talked about transparency at CP, but do you have a very precise idea of what two private companies are doing in terms of investments or predictions of future investments to reinforce their capacity to be ready for climate change? What do you know specifically on CN and CP, because they are the two biggest and they are private? Can you make an assessment of their readiness, even though you have said to us that it’s pretty difficult to predict the future, because we don’t know what is going to happen?
Those are my complicated questions. But be simple in your answers, please — not too many difficult technical words.
Mr. Hendry: I’ll take that, and Mr. Miller, maybe, you can fill in a bit more, because you have seen more of the inside.
At the university, we work a research basis. We are collaborative with them. We discuss issues they may have and try to come up with research questions that we can ask. We design experiments and help them with that respect.
We don’t typically get into the big budget discussions as to where their funding is allocated. Unfortunately, I don’t have a window into that, to answer your question.
Mr. Miller: To your very first question about the railroads being “ready,” I think we would be hard-pressed to say that the railroads are ready for climate change, given what we saw in British Columbia over the past year — fire and then flood both having dramatic impacts in constraining the supply chains in a very dramatic fashion.
So it’s not a case of a destination of being ready, I don’t think at this point; it’s a case of the journey to continue to improve.
To that point, and to your question, the railways are quite public — and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, unfortunately — about the capital investments they make in terms of improving and hardening the infrastructure; replacing assets, rolling stock and systems; and things of that nature. You can look at their analyst briefing books and you can listen to their quarterly reports. They are quite proud actually —
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Are they replacing or are they making it better? Can we have an assessment from you about that, or is it just not possible?
Mr. Miller: It’s a very good question. I would say that they do not tend to replace in kind. You heard my good friend Ian Simpson speaking about that. So when you go in to do major rehab on a bridge, for example, you might raise that bridge. You would take it from a timber-tie condition to a ballast-deck condition so that it’s less susceptible to fire and it’s easier to maintain the track alignment through the bridge. You can raise embankments. I read recently about embankments being raised in flood-prone areas in the U.S. in this particular example up to close to a metre.
It’s “don’t build back” but, to use the hackneyed phrase, “build back better.” They are quite open about the level of investment they make.
Again, to Senator Simons’ point a few minutes ago, the notion of having a whole alternate route through the most difficult territories in Canada is a whole other thing. That’s not investing 20% of your gross revenues every year, which is what the railways, by and large, average in terms of capital investment; that’s massively more. It’s orders of magnitudes more to do that type of work.
Senator Miville-Dechêne: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Cormier: Our study is about the impact of climate change on infrastructure, but also about the impact of critical infrastructure on climate change. Clearly, there has been a lot of talk about the impact of climate change on infrastructure.
My question for you is on the second aspect, and I’m referring to the government’s announced 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction plan in which it commits to designing an action plan based on voluntary agreements with industry to decarbonize the railways, consistent with Canada’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal. This could include efforts to electrify locomotives.
Is locomotive electrification the best way, the ultimate way to reduce the climate change impact of rail infrastructure? Are there other ways? I’d like to hear from you on that.
[English]
Mr. Miller: Thank you, senator. It’s good to see yet another New Brunswick face. I’m a transplanted Fredericton boy myself.
Electrification, broadly, of the entire network has been looked at a number of times in the past. It’s very difficult to — and I hate to use the business phrase — make the numbers work. It’s just a big challenge.
So the current focus of the reduction of diesel fuel consumption has been around things like battery-powered locomotives; alternative fuels; and bio-based fuels, which are being tested in a number of locations. Personally, I’m particularly excited about the example of a hydrogen fuel cell locomotive that CP is undertaking at their headquarters in Calgary.
Beyond that, it’s just year-over-year reduction in consumption through things like — as Ian Simpson mentioned — automatic stop-start on the locomotives and trip optimizer, which is a computer program on the locomotive that takes into account the characteristics of the train and also the characteristics of the route it will operate over and selects the optimum throttle position to get the train over the road on schedule but minimize fuel consumption.
A third thing that is delivering substantial results is matching the weight of the train to the maximum throttle notch that you will allow the locomotive engineer to employ, so we don’t get these jackrabbit starts away from the signal when it turns green. However, you get a much more fuel-efficient operation. Those incremental measures are contributing round figures of 1% to 2% improvement per year for both CN and CP.
Another one, of course, is retiring older locomotives as you bring in new Tier 4-compliant locomotives that have a much lower fuel consumption per gross tonne mile of freight moved. Electrification for a particular corridor for passenger rail is well worth pursuing and looking into in much greater detail. For the freight system, generally, across a network where your locomotives are interchanged with other railroads to ensure fluidity, that’s a tough one at this point.
Senator Cormier: What else could it be then? I’m thinking about the federal government. What type of focus should they have then if electrification is not the only solution?
Mr. Miller: As my colleague and friend Caroline Healey mentioned, the work that is being done with Transport Canada between the railways and the Railway Association of Canada through the memorandum of understanding process is important. The fact that suppliers to the rail industry are North America-wide means it’s a bit difficult to have a completely made-in-Canada solution. They manufacture the locomotives in Texas, and the big railways down there are maybe not that interested in some of our particular problems up here.
The federal government should have a North American focus, provide support through the memorandum of understanding and acknowledge the efforts that have been made. One of the honourable senators mentioned a 44% reduction in fuel intensity since 1990 and targeting — I shouldn’t guess at the number, and that’s all I would be doing — a significant reduction by 2030 and close to net zero by 2050 in the industry. There’s a lot of work going on.
Senator Cormier: Thank you.
Senator Quinn: I have a follow-up about the risk, the predictability of risk and the work you talked about, Dr. Hendry. There are different choke points that are risks. For example, the isthmus between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick is a point of risk. It’s known. There are options being examined as to what we are going to do. We don’t want to make Nova Scotia an island and cut off important transportation links.
Coming back to the slope that they talked about, the ability to look at the millimetre of movement and the question of who owns the risk — and I’m asking this because at the end of the day, we have to make recommendations — if we can identify who owns the risk at the time of the detection of the problem, shouldn’t there be a way to make it the responsibility of those owners to take action to minimize that risk?
Mr. Hendry: That’s a big question. To be honest, there are whole books written on it, mostly from the United Kingdom, about trying to shift risk and the ownership of risk between the government, landowners and so on.
There are always two parts to risk. One part is the hazard. If you could prove that the government or its Crown owns the hazard, it doesn’t mean they own the consequence. That would potentially take a legal expert rather than myself.
Senator Quinn: If the consequence of the risk results in a closure of a major transportation route, it in essence causes huge economic issues for the country. The cost of the economic impact may be much greater than the remediation that could have addressed that risk. I’m really asking: Is that something that this committee should think about with respect to observations and recommendations we may want to make?
Mr. Hendry: The insurable risk that a railway takes on is much smaller than the risk to the entire economy if it goes out of service. Step in, Mr. Miller, if I start sticking my foot in my mouth. The railroad is responsible for what it’s carrying and for lost revenue to its shareholders. That’s their insurable amount of risk, but they are not responsible, then, for the closure of a plant in, say, southern Ontario. Am I wrong, Mr. Miller?
Mr. Miller: No, you’re not wrong at all, Mr. Hendry. To the senator’s point, you put your finger on what would be an outstanding area of study on this question in a Canadian context, which is the isthmus where there are old embankments owned by the farmers, some protection provided by the highway embankment and some protection provided by the railway embankment. If you’re looking for a can of worms to open, the transference of risk and who should invest what in that situation is a tremendous example. I certainly don’t have the answer.
Senator Quinn: Thank you.
The Chair: A simple question that I have is: If we compare our readiness in terms of our railway infrastructure vis-à-vis the climatic changes we are facing compared to the mitigating steps or actions our American friends are taking, which of our countries is best prepared? Who is doing a better job in getting ready for the climatic challenges that our railway industry is facing?
Mr. Hendry: Looking at maps of the U.S. and Canada, they are starkly different in that the U.S. actually has more redundant routes, more ways through mountain passes from one side of the country to the other side, so inherently, there is more built-in resiliency in that system.
In Canada, as we mentioned before, as soon as you enter the mountains in B.C., your options are limited. In some cases, we are sharing the same river valley and sometimes the same side of the river valley, so we don’t have that resiliency. Perhaps taking advantage of the U.S. railroads would add additional resiliency. Providing alternative routes through the U.S. might be the best option.
However, I don’t think I got to the crux of your point, which was, “Who is preparing better?” I can’t answer that question, unfortunately.
Mr. Miller: I can’t provide a good answer either. I know that railroads in both Canada and the U.S. are investing heavily. They are practising risk management and good practices. The question is: How ready can you be for that next big event like the one we saw in British Columbia?
Senator Klyne: Thank you. I’m going to try to rephrase my question another way, because it never got answered. Through the perspective or lens of climate change vulnerability, which has been heightened in the last couple of years, we couldn’t have waved a magic wand and gotten to all of the infrastructure of rail lines. Are there any areas, regions or lines that are still vulnerable?
Mr. Miller: Yes. As we talked about, we’re certainly still vulnerable through the Thompson River and Fraser River canyons. Despite millions of dollars of investment annually by both railroads in that territory, never say never, but it’s unlikely you will encase those mountains in concrete to fully protect against that type of thing. As Mr. Hendry just pointed out, that’s where we’re particularly vulnerable, because there is limited optionality.
Back through northern Ontario, there are some issues, as well as through the Prairies. There is actually pretty good optionality with the work going on at Port Saint John, and my friend Ian Simpson mentioned the purchase of the former Central Maine & Quebec Railway and strengthening that link to Saint John as an alternative in an emergency situation to Halifax. There’s some optionality there.
Where we’re still vulnerable and where there is a lot of work and investment being made are in those Thompson River and Fraser River canyons.
The Chair: Dr. Hendry, Mr. Paul Miller, I would like to thank you both for your very insightful presentations. Thank you for the time you spent answering all our questions.
Colleagues, I will call this meeting to an end until the next time when we continue our study on the effects of climate change on our infrastructure in Canada with the Transportation and Communications Committee of the Senate of Canada.
(The committee adjourned.)