Transport Minister Marc Garneau speaks in the House of Commons in Ottawa on April 11, 2016.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Transport Minister Marc Garneau says he intends to act swiftly if it's determined safety lapses caused a Toronto train derailment over the weekend.
Part of a Canadian Pacific freight train derailed in the city's mid-town early Sunday, but police and railway officials said the incident posed no threat to public safety.
CP Rail said there was a small diesel leak after a freight train with two locomotives struck another CP freight train. The railway said the leak was quickly contained and there is no environmental risk from the incident.
A CP Rail spokesman also said there were no dangerous goods on board the train that derailed.
But a spokesman for the Transportation Safety Board, Chris Krepski, told The Canadian Press that there were a small amount of dangerous materials, including aerosol containers and non-flammable gases, on the freight trains. He said none of the substances leaked.
Garneau said the federal government has already brought in safety improvements in response to the 2013 train disaster in Lac-Megantic that killed 47 people.
"The next step is of course to find out what happened, why did this collision occur between two trains going in opposite directions, what were the consequences," he said Monday on his way into a cabinet retreat in Sudbury, Ont.
"My aim is to reduce as much as possible these kinds of incidents, and so I intend to act swiftly if we find that there are things that we need to be doing that we haven't been doing in the past."
CP Rail says the collision was the result of human error. The CP Rail police and Transportation Safety Board of Canada are investigating the collision.