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Ottawa’s announces rail-safety changes, but critics say measures fall short

Ottawa is finally moving on the Transportation Safety Board's recommendations to improve railway safety in the wake of last summer's Lac-Mégantic disaster.

Transport Minister Lisa Raitt announced the federal government's several steps, effective immediately.

The measures include a three-year phase-out or retrofitting of older DOT-111 tank cars that figured in the derailment and explosions that incinerated the centre of the Quebec town and killed 47 people.

However, CBC News noted, the government will not implement a key safety board recommendation that Canada's railways do route planning for dangerous-goods trains.

Raitt also told a news conference the railways have 30 days to remove from service tank cars that are the least crash-resistant and lack continuous reinforcing of the lower part of their shells. It's estimated about 5,000 are in use in North America, CBC News said.

[ Related: TSB rail safety recommendations are one thing, getting them implemented another ]

The estimated 65,000 DOT-111 tank cars must be phased out or upgraded if railways want to use them in Canada, she said.

"Officials have advised us three years is doable," the minister told a news conference in Ottawa.

While the United States, which has been working with Canada on tank-car safety since Lac-Mégantic, will not be using the three-year timeline, Raitt said the rail industry "can see where this is going" and is already replacing the DOT-111s with safer cars, CBC News reported.

"This has been a voluntary standard since 2011, and indeed all these cars since 2011 have been built to this standard that we're [now] entrenching in regulation," the minister said.

Older DOT-111 cars used to carry oil and other flammable goods have been pointed to by safety critics as prone to rupturing in crashes and for lacking systems to vent volatile gases that build up inside the tanks. It's thought such gases from a cargo of crude originating in North Dakota's Bakken oil field exploded when the runaway train derailed in Lac-Mégantic's town centre.

Subsequent investigation and news reports also suggested volatile cargoes weren't being properly classified before being shipped.

CBC News said Raitt also announced railways must have mandatory emergency-response plans for all petroleum shipments, even if they amount to only a single tank car in a train.

A task force also will be set up to strengthen emergency-response capacity across Canada.

Time being money, railways doubtlessly won't be pleased with another new requirement that limits the speed of dangerous-goods trains to 80 kilometres an hour, and perhaps even slower in some areas once a full assessment is done.

[ Related: Rail safety: TSB discovers companies not reporting all derailments ]

In what appears to be a concession to the railways, the Conservative government opted not to require route planning for dangerous-goods trains. The industry hard argued it would be costly and inefficient to divert such trains around population centres, which many municipal governments have requested.

It didn't take long for critics to poke holes in the plan.

"This announcement really falls short, and lets Canadians down," Brian Stevens, the head of the union that represents rail-car inspectors in Canada's railway sector, told CBC News.

"These DOT-111 cars, they should be banned from carrying crude oil immediately. They can still be used to carry vegetable oil, or diesel fuel, but for carrying this dangerous crude there should be an immediate moratorium and that should have been easy enough for the minister to do and she failed to do that."

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said the changes don't go far enough.

"They're going to try and tell us today that they're acting on that [the safety of rail tanker cars] but she's going to try and set a timeline for years from now," he said.

"What happens in the meantime in all those communities where this very dangerous material is being transported today?"

The NDP's transport critic Hoang Mai was relieved at the announcement but said it was overdue.

“Successive Liberal and Conservative governments were aware of the danger involved in using these railway cars for more than a decade, but did nothing,” the Quebec MP said in a news release. “Public safety needs to be a top priority for the government. It’s unreasonable that it took them so long to act on TSB recommendations.”

Mai said the party was also disappointed the announcement included nothing to force railways to provide advance information to communities before dangerous-goods trains go through. They only get such data on a voluntary basis after the fact, which doesn't allow municipalities time to prepare emergency-response plans, Mai said.

There was no immediate reaction from the federal Liberals.

Claude Dauphin of the Canadian Federation of Municipalities praised the announcement as a "major step forward" in railway safety and protecting the communities they run through.