Transport Committee on March 27th, 2014

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

We have noticed as well that the Transportation Safety Board has made recommendation after recommendation after recommendation, including recommendations on the DOT-111 cars, but also recommendations on the safety of the drivers, the safety of the passengers, and the automatic stopping mechanisms. None of them have been implemented by Transport Canada despite all these recommendations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Sullivan.

We now move to Mr. Braid for five minutes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Boudreault, I would just start with a question for you, please. Obviously, safety is a very important focus of our discussions today, and I appreciate your testimony. Could you explain and brief the committee on the steps that you and your union take to enhance safety and to train on safety? What measures and training steps do you take as a union?

[Richard Boudreault]

Actually, the steps are not very complicated. Our people have been given training for years on various aspects of regulations, both provincial and federal. Our union has people who are experts on those matters.

In addition, Local 1976 specializes in transportation and handles most of our unionized rail companies. We provide training in Ottawa with experts. If required, we dissect the regulations for a week so that we are able to provide our members with adequate tools to make sure they are safe.

We have been taking a stand against various situations for a long time. In 2007, for example, we sent to a committee a situation in which trains were travelling at high speed when our members were working right beside. We made representations to the employers about it. Today, we are making a presentation to you. So we do whatever we can to try to work in safety so that earning a living does not cost us our lives.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you.

In a similar vein, there's been, and I'm sure you're aware of this, some discussion about the possibility of installing video cameras in the cabs of locomotives to give additional safeguards and additional levels of information should an incident occur. Do you or your union have a particular position on the installation of video cameras in the cabs of locomotives?

[Richard Boudreault]

We have no objection with that as a security measure. Our union's only fear is that those video cameras will be used for other things. They must not be used to penalize our members by seeing if they are doing their jobs, or to examine workers like you examine a microbe under a microscope. That is what we do not want.

The case law is clear on the issue. When there are strategic points for which the use of cameras is justified and when there are no other ways of ensuring safety, we have no difficulty. However, the cameras must not be used to spy on workers to see whether they are making mistakes or not. That is the position that we have always taken.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you for clarifying that.

Mr. Hematian, you spent some time this morning, and thank you, giving us some detail about important enhancements to railcars, to the DOT-111 type of railcar. Could you outline the key enhancements in innovations that your company brings to this particular new model of railcar, and why they're so important?

[Jamal Hematian]

As I mentioned at the beginning, tank cars are very heavily regulated. If the AAR says it's TC-128, one-half inch, I cannot change it. I cannot go with less. I can go with more; but I cannot go with less. If they say a valve should be within this pressure, it has to be that. I cannot change it. What we do when we change it is through our detail design. We design railcars based on a 50-year life. It doesn't matter what type. Based on AAR, when you design a freight railcar, it goes for 50 years. That means if they want it to go beyond 50 years, they have to take it out of service, visit it, check it, recertify it for extended life. That's one.

The second one is we design it for fatigue life. To design any freight cars, you have to look at different aspects of design. There's static design, dynamic design, fatigue design, buckling, and model. One of the key design factors is fatigue life. These railcars are under a lot of vibration. It is not like our cars that have very soft suspension and you don't feel the vibration. It's steel on steel so it gets lots of vibration. So on fatigue life for a railcar, again as specified by AAR, it says for interchange cars it has to be a 1-million mile minimum. For cars, a unit, a train service, like intermodal cars, it has to be a minimum of 3 million miles. What NSC is doing with our cars is going beyond that. Our design is for 5 million miles. That is differentiating us from others, and some customers are asking for that, and they pay for that. It doesn't come for free. This is like options on your car; if you want that, it's different.

Generally speaking, on the details, we protect our IP and we make small changes. But on tank cars, it's not big items. The big items are fixed: that's the minimum, you have to meet it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'll move to Ms. Boutin-Sweet for five minutes.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen.

There are really a lot of questions that I would like to ask you. But first I am going to pass on a message from some of my colleagues from the Hamilton region. They told me that they are very happy to see that a local company is manufacturing products of such high quality, that the employees are unionized, and they have good, well-paying jobs. It shows that Canadian companies are capable of producing tank cars that can replace the DOT-111s. It could generate good, well-paying jobs. Congratulations for all that from myself, and from my colleagues who have asked me to say hi to you this morning.

Mr. Boudreault, you said that the communities, the workers and the first responders needed to know what was in the tanker cars. The government says that they did know. The problem is that they found out later.

Usually, people are informed about what is going to go through their communities, about the products in general. But with specific products, they are not informed. That is why the first responders do not know how to respond to the emergency.

Do you think that argument is on track, if you will excuse the pun?

[Richard Boudreault]

As I was saying earlier, the first responders are not always members of our union. We have to be careful. People working on the tracks or in trains carrying hazardous materials also have to be aware of what the train is carrying. That seems necessary to me. In any situation, an employee who is not aware can cause anything from an incident to a major accident. In addition, first responders must at very least know which hazardous materials are moving through their communities so that the community can act in a safe and appropriate way when different incidents occur.

Let me give you an example. People are terrorized at the moment. Everyone here keeps up with the news, I am sure. As recently as yesterday, a number of communities in the area around Lac-Mégantic held a demonstration in the town to demand that the government relocate the tracks around the community.

People are afraid, and rightly so. Situations such as the ones we have just gone through must never happen again. Why are they afraid? Because they do not know what is in the trains going through their towns. Imagine! You live in a community, and I am sure that you would like to have the same information, in some fashion, for yours.

Some people will talk about terrorism and will say that, if that kind of information is released, it will open the door to all sorts of crazy people who might do something one day. That is not what we are asking for. No one is asking for the general public to be told what the train is carrying and when it is arriving. That is not so. We are asking that first responders at least be informed about when the train will arrive and what products it is carrying. They are trained and so they will know what to do if an incident or an accident occurs.

Let us not forget that the people in Lac-Mégantic were pouring water on the accident site for more than a day. That had environmental consequences. The oil soaked into the soil and ended up in the rivers and, from there, it spread everywhere. It would have been better to use a foam for an adequate response, but they did not have that equipment at hand. They had a tragic, catastrophic situation to deal with, but they could have avoided having to deal with an environmental disaster as well.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

Also, these days, we are learning that more and more accidents are not reported.

[Richard Boudreault]

That is true.

[Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet, NDP, Hochelaga, QC]

So there are all kinds of things to be afraid of.

My question goes to Mr. Hematian, Mr. Vanderby, or even Mr. Boudreault.

The design standards for the 2011 tank cars were applied in 2013. The industry in general had accepted those standards. Do you think that the standards are sufficient for shipping hazardous material such as crude oil, for example? Do you think we need even tougher standards in order to help in protecting people?

[Jamal Hematian]

Okay, good question. No yes or no answers, and I'll tell you why.

In any engineering design, you have to look at a system. A system has different elements in it. You have to look at all the elements, design them, operate them, and maintain them to achieve a certain goal. In this system, if you have spent all your money on one element, you are not going to have an efficient system satisfying your needs. With tank cars, you have car designs. That's one. Here it was said that operation is another part of it. The product you put in there is another part of it. Education is a part of it. You cannot just focus on one element of the system and forget about the others.

Let me put it in a different format. Every one of us drives a car, and we have accidents on the roads. What do we do? Are we going to jump the gun and say, “All these are small cars. We should eliminate them. Everybody should use SUVs because they are safer.” Or we go back and look at the data. We root cause the problem, and set up a DOE—design of experiment—and set all these parameters here based on real data. We say, “There are ten factors; these are the results.” There is a program within Six Sigma that you can use. It will show you what the effect is of each element on the system, what the effect is of two elements' interaction on the system, or three interactions, and so forth.

So if you ask me if we should go ahead and increase the thickness, I say, “What's the purpose of that?” I'm saying that if you add 10,000 pounds to this car, are you getting the same ratio increase in the safety? No. Based on the fatigue life, static analysis, and dynamic analysis, you get 5% at a maximum.

The other factor I want to add is that when designing the automobiles we drive, everybody's life is in it, and they are moving on the roads, the streets, and outside. Are they going to, based on some accidents, increase the light weight of those cars by 500 pounds just to make it safer? No, they look at what the cost is to address the issue right there.

So we have to be very careful. I'm just coming from my profession.

These new cars, the CPC-1232, the total number from 2011 up to here is only 14,000, compared to almost, let's say, 90,000 DOT-111s. We should go back, look at the data. How many accidents on the legacy cars? How many accidents on the good-faith cars? Then we know which direction we should go. Is this new design not enough, or is it enough? If I add another 16, how long does it take me to get back together here and add another 16, or another half inch to it? We should have a target in our minds.

I'm just coming from pure engineering.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. Those are very good comments.

I'm going to have to cut it off there and go to Ms. Young for five minutes.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you so much for your presentations today. This is obviously a very serious matter.

Mr. Boudreault, I really commend you for your passion and commitment to safety. Obviously more needs to be done, and that's why we're here.

I would like to know if you know about Bill S-4 and about all the new regulations and measures in there that we've put into place. You do have a copy of it somewhere, or somebody can get him a copy or something.

I wanted to ask you particularly about the training. What kind of training currently exists for people who are running the trains right now? I mean, we know about the SMS. That's the plan, but what about the actual training?

[Richard Boudreault]

Training is specifically provided on the—

SMS, the safety management system.

We also provide training on—

GOI, general operating instructions.

Currently, we provide training on the handbrake policy. We also provide it on the legislation and regulations that apply to railways. We give that training to all the members of our union who work on the rails.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Sorry, go ahead.

[Jamal Hematian]

Can I add something here about training? I'm not quite sure about the SMS system. I'm just coming from design and manufacturing. From day one, when we look at the tank car business the first thing we had to do was everybody—not design engineers, not manufacturers—everybody in our company for whom there was a chance they would go close to the tank cars we are building, touch them or see them, had to go to a very specific training called haz-mat. Everybody goes through that haz-mat training and we went through it. There is a test, and you have to write the test and you have to pass. Every one of us on our hardhat has a sticker, a big red sticker, that says this guy has been through the training and has passed the test. That haz-mat training talks about tank cars, it talks about safety, it talks about different commodities, and there are different signs.

When we finish the tank car we put a stencil on it. It tells what this tank car is, the capacity, who built it, when it was built, when was the last time it was inspected, what type of valves are on it, what type of brakes. Everything is on the tank car. He is the expert of stencilling the car. There is another section with signs. So if somebody doesn't know how to read, there is a sign that shows what category of products this tank can move. So in the training for us, for designers and manufacturers, we cannot touch even a piece of tank car without passing the haz-mat test. And the haz-mat has different training levels for different categories.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Obviously that's a very extensive system. You are the people who build the cars. Then it goes to the companies, obviously. The companies have some training system in place and this is what I want to explore. Because you have something in place and you have built the cars to a level to meet the requirements. You've passed this on to the companies. The companies now are responsible for training the workers. Now what we've heard from Mr. Boudreault today is that this training is either not enough or the training is not sufficient because the workers don't know what product is in the cars and how to handle that product should events happen. Is it correct that the workers are not trained up to the level that they need to be trained?

Is that what we've heard from you today, Mr. Boudreault?

[Richard Boudreault]

Actually, let me add one thing about the specific case of Lac-Mégantic. A little earlier, I went over the history of the way in which the new rules governing parking trains on the main line came about. We agree that it is unacceptable.

In terms of training, we want people to know exactly what they are working on and working with. That is important in the sense that, not only is it important to know what kind of cars people are dealing with, but also what is in the cars around which the workers, our members, are working.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Mr. Boudreault, thank you very much and I think that we all agree here. The question then, and that's why we're here today and doing this study, is where is that falling down? Obviously the people who build the tank cars give the specificity of the tank cars in terms of how to keep those places safe. Now you're telling me that the workers do have some training, but are you saying that the gap is because they do not have information on the product that they are transporting and how to respond to that product if something happens? Where is the training missing and who is...?

[Richard Boudreault]

Employers often fail to observe safety rules. Employers often make changes to safety systems and various ways of working and do not obey the rules.

We have to put up with it. We are simply asked to sign at the bottom of a form and get back to work. Someone has to take some leadership in safety matters and we think that it has to be Transport Canada. I am not blaming anyone, but Transport Canada has a leadership role to play. They have to make sure that companies strictly enforce the law in health and safety matters, for Canadians in general, as well as for the workers. If that is not done, I do not see why a railway company should be able to keep prospering in Canada when it is not obeying any laws and when it is complying with regulations in any way it likes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, time has run out.

Mr. Toet, you have five minutes.