Transport Committee on Feb. 26th, 2009

[Phil Benson]

I know that for unions, one always thinks big companies, but we have independent contractors who are teamsters. We have individual truckers who are teamsters. This is a bigger issue for our tank-haul division. The tank-hauler, the people who...well, theoretically, it could be milk. I don't know if that's a dangerous good, our dairy division. But there's butane, jet fuel, chlorine--and the biggest one for this, of course, is rail.

We have more members in rail, and it's a huge issue for our Teamsters Canada Rail Conference locomotive engineers. Partly for insurance reasons and partly because of the way the rules are written, they're not likely to choose somebody who's smaller to carry the really dangerous stuff. It's not going to be an issue.

As for the containment, I agree, most of the containment.... A few years ago we had a trucker fall asleep in Toronto, I think, and he almost took a bridge out with the fuel that went up--and God bless him. But chances are, if we're going to have real spillage and problems, it's usually with rail, not with trucks.

Again, the regulations are solid. I think this bill will help make it even better.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

As we traditionally do, we'll go around again and just see if there are any follow-ups that people might have.

Mr. Dhaliwal, and then we'll move around the table.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I had to excuse myself to speak on a wonderful motion, which was brought by my colleague and friend Mr. Kennedy, on infrastructure, and I'm certain this is also going to help the associates that are here today.

These questions may have been answered already, but I'm going to ask, as maybe they've not been covered yet.

When we talk about the security clearance, do you fellows believe there should be several levels of security clearance, or should there simply be one?

[Phil Benson]

Our position is that if you want a security clearance, there should be one.

[Barrie Montague]

We would say the same thing. The administrative nightmares associated with cross-checking this guy's security clearance with what's in that truck to make sure he's in compliance with the law.... It would be unnecessarily complicated on the side of the road.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

We constantly have dialogue with Phil Benson, and from time to time he comes to us and informs us of difficulties they face and of situations that we must be aware of. I certainly appreciate the other members' coming out today as well.

I have questions, again, on the security training. Should it be provided privately or by the government? If privately, how should it be controlled?

[Louis Laferriere]

It did come up earlier. I'll just repeat for your benefit what I had to say.

What we expect is that Transport Canada will provide us with their expectations and their guidelines, and then after that, industry will take over and provide it. We have such strong working relations with Transport Canada. You used the term “private”. It's not really private, it's together; we work together on this. So you would say it's joint, as opposed to private. We would expect joint efforts in this regard.

[Barrie Montague]

In the current training requirements in the dangerous goods regulations, what the carriers are required to ensure is that their employees have knowledge. That's as far as it goes. They lay down some fundamental principles. We believe these should be done the same way.

[Ron Lennox]

Certainly for other security programs that have been rolled out post-9/11, the expectation is always that the employer, the carrier in this case, provides that training to its employees. Again, our issue is not that there would be a requirement for training, but rather that if an employee is already trained, he or she not be subject to a second or third set of training requirements.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

There has been a lot of talk about harmonization today. How much benefit would there be in harmonizing Canadian security clearances? How often do your individual members move between security regimes? Do truckers get marine clearance or air clearance; and if so, is there a significant share of your membership that goes through those transitions?

[Phil Benson]

Thank you, Mr. Dhaliwal.

Clearly, that would probably be the teamsters more than any other group. It is easily foreseeable that one of our members could have to go to the airport in the morning, the port in the afternoon, and potentially cross a border in the evening, whether it's a dangerous good or something else.

It is simpler and easier for everybody in the long haul to have a one-stop shop on the security clearance. Another reason is that if I have to go to five committees, 14 hearings, and 14 different people to talk about a security model, fighting each one individually, it becomes both time-consuming for me and rather silly. It would seem much better to me if we had a model that we could all agree on, and then if we tweak a model, we tweak all the models. It might take time to tweak them, but we can tweak them all. If we're chasing four or five different models, that's not possible. As Mr. Kennedy raised, it's pretty hard for Parliament to oversee five or six different models, but I know you can oversee one.

[Sukh Dhaliwal, Liberal, Newton—North Delta, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Laframboise.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Benson, earlier you made a comment about the enforcement of the regulations. You said that the provinces did not necessarily all apply the regulations in a fair way everywhere in Canada and that the government should think of helping out some provinces. I agree with you. The municipalities made the same observation, as did the mayors of the large cities. Actually, all the cities, or the mayors of the cities that have police forces tell us that the federal government adopts legislation or amends the Criminal Code and gives them extra responsibility without ever giving them any extra money. The situation is the same.

My question is simple. Would it be of any advantage if the government helped the provinces or the territories to improve their inspection service or to create their own inspection service for dangerous goods?

[Phil Benson]

Being shy, I'm always reluctant to tell governments how to spend money. As I talked about earlier, what we want is enforcement. We want safety standards met. We want equality across the country, and hopefully with reciprocity with the United States. How that's funded and how it's dealt with is for all of you to eventually deal with. For me, it was an off-the-cuff statement.

Our goal is to have the enforcement, to have the proper training, to have the proper stuff. It's probably a point that the first ministers can argue about, as they seem to always do. What's important is, if we do want safety, at the end of the day somebody has to pay for it. How the governments, among themselves, deal with that is between them, but at the end of the day, we would rather see enforcement. As we said in our presentation, we need to have rules and regulations. If they're not enforced, it makes it meaningless. Hopefully this will make sure it's not meaningless.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

My final question is for Mr. Montague. Is your industry ready to defray all the costs and expenses for training? Mr. Laferriere, it seems fairly clear on your side. Does the same thing apply to the trucking industry?

[Barrie Montague]

I'm not sure we're willing to assume, but I suspect that's what's going to happen. We had no choice with the current security training as required by C-TPAT. The industry had to absorb it.

Our industry has had to absorb every cost associated with cross-border transportation as a result of 9/11. Our industry has borne every cost. Delays at the border, cost of FAST cards, cost of training, cost of this, cost of that--we've borne everything. We've not been able to recover a penny from the shipping community, not one penny. So we're absorbing it all. Under the current economic climate, I suspect we'll be continuing to absorb it even if we don't want to do so.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Bevington.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thanks.

I have a comment on costing. If you're adding a security blanket to the industry and the responsibility of Transport Canada is now not only for ensuring that you're following the safety procedures with hazardous goods but for ensuring that you're following the security procedures with hazardous goods, that is going to add burden to the transportation department as well if it's to continue to keep up the job it has to do. It's not a burden on you; I'm considering the burden on the transportation department to make sure everything is followed under the act as laid out.

The question I have, though, speaks to our having had witnesses in here, saying that in regard to the transportation security clearance—this is coming from our government officials—the discussions are on right now within the SPP process to come up with the regulations that are going to be enforced in Canada.

So, Mr. Benson, your suggestion that you're totally confident that the Canadian regulators will come up with decisions about the civil rights of Canadians, the privacy rights of Canadians, is actually not quite correct, because what we're doing is negotiating with another country to put standards of security clearance on our own people, and those standards have to meet what the Americans want. What they are asking us to do may not fit with what we would normally do for our citizens, so one transportation certificate or one security clearance certificate that requires putting an undue burden on somebody crossing the border, should that be applied to a Canadian within this country, would have an impact on his civil rights and liberties. Your suggestion of a single transportation security clearance doesn't seem to follow under that.

[Phil Benson]

If you'll please let me clarify that, first of all, I have confidence, at the end of the day, in the Supreme Court of Canada, through an appeal route through the Federal Court. I have some confidence in our courts. As an officer of the court, I have to have some confidence in the courts, and I hope that all Canadians do. I have much greater confidence in that than I do in the Department of Homeland Security.

And I'm not being disrespectful to the Department of Homeland Security. They're doing a wonderful job protecting their country and their interests.

As to the SPP, these transport security clearances are not new. Tens of thousands of Canadians carry one or a different form of those today. We have run thousands of members through them, with a very small rejection rate--less than 0.011%.

As to some issue that this is dealing with the SPP, we're tied up with ICAO; we're tied up with the UN on dangerous goods; we're tied up with everybody in the world. We have trading partners. We're in a global economy. After 9/11, the world has changed.

We wish we did not need these. When we are told point-blank—

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

That's not the question.

[Phil Benson]

I'm getting to the question.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Is a single security clearance that may infringe upon workers' rights of privacy appropriate in this country?

[Phil Benson]

Yes, and I'll get to the point.