Rail safety group wants to prevent a Lac Megantic disaster in Toronto

They roll through Toronto – long transport trains rumbling in some of the city’s most populated areas like The Junction, Forest Hill and Rosedale – passing close to homes and crossing major intersections like Yonge, Avenue and Bayview.

For the past two years, the group Rail Safety First has been actively raising concerns that a Lac Megantic disaster could happen in Toronto, and on Wednesday night two prominent Toronto MPs are hosting a town hall on the issue in hopes of getting real change to rail safety in the city.

Among the 10 key demands for the federal government, the group is asking for more regulation, rerouting dangerous cargo to less populated areas and forcing trains that dissect the city to slow to a crawl.

“We want to slow the trains down when they are going through densely-populated areas,” says Claire Kilgour Hervey of Rail Safety First. “It’s a no-brainer. It’s easy and it could be done tomorrow.”

Chrystia Freeland, Caroline Bennett and Transportation Minister Marc Garneau will be attending the meeting.

The group is also calling for an immediate moratorium on older DOT-111 cars, the tanker cars that exploded in Lac Megantic.

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Since the Lac Megantic disaster in 2013, rail safety has been a hot-button item, but little progress has been made in improving Canada’s railways.

Over the last seven years rail has quietly become a backdoor alternative to pipelines. In 2009, some 500 carloads of petroleum crude were transported across the country on CP rails. That number has skyrocketed to 140,000 carloads by 2013.

“It’s a stunning increase,” says Henry Wiercinski of Rail Safety First. “Well, proportionately, a 28,000-per cent increase in a matter of four years I would have thought would have caught someone’s attention.”

Despite the Transportation Safety Board’s recommendations in 2014, controversial DOT-111 rail cars are still being used and companies are not publicizing their safety records or dangerous goods cargo. Dangerous goods continue to travel through densely-populated areas like downtown Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.

According to a CBC investigation earlier this year, Transport Canada refused to release important information about safety issues found on railways across the country.

The group Safe Rail Communities launched a petition in February calling on the federal government to enact a number of measures, including setting standards for crude oil volatility, increase the number of rail inspectors and require unlimited liability insurance for rail companies.

The federal Liberals have promised increased transparency in rail safety, and pledged $143 million in the 2016 budget “to strengthen oversight and enforcement, and to enhance prevention and response capabilities related to rail safety and the transportation of dangerous goods.”