Transport Committee on April 3rd, 2014

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

How many DOT-111s does CN own?

[Jim Vena]

We own 40 of them, and the 40 are gone. We lease another 118 and we have a program to get rid of them over the next three years as we're able to put them in the mix to get them built.

As for the safety program, the numbers are already open to anybody who wants to see them. The TSB puts them out. You can see our numbers.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I'm talking about on the front end, what your safety objectives are for 2014.

[Jim Vena]

There's community engagement, Saint Mary's on safety culture, and in fact, if people want—

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Maybe I'll be a little more specific.

[Jim Vena]

Do you actually want my EPS,that says what my EPS is? I'll give it to you; I have no problem with it.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

These are elements that currently aren't necessarily publicly disclosed. I'm probing which aspects of safety management systems you'd be comfortable disclosing to the public, I guess. That's where I'm going. Your safety objectives for the year, in a detailed fashion, not just broadly.... We want to reduce access. By how much? From what to what? It's those types of things.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, let him answer that.

[Keith E. Creel]

Could I please add one point of clarification? I did not realize this, but all of our safety objectives on an annual basis are posted, submitted to Transport Canada, and posted across the property for all of the employees. Internally, it is posted already and it is provided.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

But not to the public.

[Keith E. Creel]

Transport Canada to the public.... Our employees work in.... They live in the communities that we operate in and through. It's not broadly posted to the public, but certainly it's not confidential.

[Michael Farkouh, Vice-President, Safety and Sustainability, Canadian National Railway Company]

Perhaps I could just add one point.

Mr. Chair, I think we left you a copy of our leadership and safety document, which is a culture of safety that is found for the general public on the CN Internet site. I would invite you to look at that document in question on CN's Internet site, and there you will see our targets for 2014. So they are publicly available in terms of what we are striving for in terms of safety for accidents and injuries.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you.

I'll now move to Mr. Toet, for seven minutes.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you, all, for being here today because this is helpful for us. I think we're all on the same page that we want to see improvements.

I just want to pick up on the municipal issue of interchange, of what is actually on the trains, their ability to respond.

In regard to that, I understand that both CN and CP have their own responders who also respond to any incident.

How quickly are your responders able to be at the site of any incident within your network, from your shortest time to your longest time?

[Jim Vena]

We usually have employees who get there very quickly because we're spread out. For example, in Winnipeg we have facilities very close.

Usually if there's something, the first responder—the conductor is on site, the locomotive engineer is on site—will advise. Usually if you're within the city limit or close to it, the fire department and the emergency people from the communities can beat us to the site. They assess first, and they deal with the conductor to find out what's on the train. That's first. We have people across the country and contractors who we hold so that if we need to respond, we respond fairly quickly.

It's not something you want to have a good experience at, but we've had to deal with these things, and we feel we're very good at being able to respond, and respond quickly.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Creel.

[Keith E. Creel]

I would say there are multiple layers of defence and response.

To Jim's point, the conductors are trained in haz-mat response and haz-mat handling. We have haz-mat specialists across the property that are there immediately. They're on call 24-7 to at least counsel and coach those who are on the ground. As you go up through the organization to the mechanical officers, to the train masters, all of those individuals have had training, and we're in the process of providing additional training.

As far as response time is concerned, it's immediate. The degree of response escalates as time goes on and gets stronger and stronger. It is an area that we feel is very strong. Even to that point, we've been in collaboration with CN prior to Lac-Mégantic, to decrease our response time, to increase our ability, sharing each other's resources, sharing each other's employees, sharing each other's knowledge, and our supplies in the event of a haz-mat accident.

[Michael Farkouh]

Perhaps I could just add to that point.

Part of our community outreach was really to reach out to those first emergency responders so we can have a direct rapport with them. When an incident happens, as Mr. Creel indicated, we also have many lines of defence starting from the conductor and going to the local individuals who are trained in haz-mat to a certain degree. Our highly skilled and trained individuals are strategically located throughout the network. We have a very vast network.

What's important to us in our community outreach with those first responders is to create that link. When an incident occurs they're on the phone immediately talking to the fire chief, if he's the emergency responder, with our dangerous goods officer, who may be coming. He'll be in a plane or he'll be in a helicopter or he'll be on the road to get to that site immediately.

Part of our training, whether it's through railroad emergency response or through Trans-Care, is to provide not how to fight a fire, but how to respond to a railcar. That's why we spend a lot of hours on the ground with emergency responders, to train them on the intricacies of a railcar, and what differs from a regular house fire or an industry fire, and so forth.

More often than not communities may have a haz-mat response, and oftentimes they do not, or they have a coalition with other communities. We've put a lot of emphasis with regard to creating that communication link, but most importantly, as a first responder, it's what to be on the look out for, how to be prepared, how we are structured in terms of our emergency response.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Obviously, that's dealing with the after incidents. I want to turn the channel a little bit to your safety management systems and your trying to avoid the incident in the first place.

As brief as you can be, but with some detail, I would like to have a response from each of you, CN, CP, and also from Mr. Bourque, regarding the smaller rail companies you represent and their implementation.

How do you plan your SMS regime? Who is involved in that process? How do you measure internally and audit any goals you have? Who is involved in that measurement process?

Last, I would like all of you also to touch on the aspect of employee input on matters of concern that may arise. How are they protected in your safety management system to make sure that there's never a fear for somebody coming forward when they see a safety concern that there will be repercussions on them?

Could each of you address that reasonably briefly, but in some detail?

[Jim Vena]

I'm going to pass this off to Michael Farkouh, our vice-president of safety and sustainability, just to start off on how we measure the SMS. Before I do that, however, let me comment on employee engagement.

We engage with our unionized employees, and all our employees, on a number of different levels. We engage with them on a system level, where we sit down with the general chairman of all the major unions, the policy committee, to make sure we have the right policies in place, and we work together to enhance safety out in the field.

We have 102 health and safety committees across Canada, where we work locally with the different union members and people that operate trains, fix trains, and fix cars. We have that.

We have an ombudsman, so if people feel they don't want to talk directly to the supervisor for some reason, they can call in anonymously.

We also just started a program with Saint Mary's University, where they are collecting data for people that want to phone in and talk about safety issues and safety programs. They collate it, and they add it up in a completely anonymous manner so we get the information.

For us, our employees are the very first level of safety, and if they are not safe, that's where you have problems, if people don't tie down hand brakes even though we have a rule in place, and don't secure the train properly even though we have systems in place that should stop the train automatically. We want the employees to do that.

I think we're tied in with the unions. We work together well with them. We're always looking for ways to improve, but we have it at multiple levels, from my level right down to the local manager with the local union people out in the field.

[Michael Farkouh]

I will speak briefly on auditing and measuring.

The question becomes, why do we keep numbers? Quite honestly, it's to ensure that we are progressing, that we're on the right track, and what we have in place is effective.

When we look at our measurements, our measurements will go down to the very lowest level, to the exact yard or terminal, so we can really see whether those terminals, those locations, those geographic operations, those varying departments are continuing to improve, and that they are—no pun intended—on the right track.

When we establish fairly aggressive targets with regard to all those levels of our operation, it's to ensure that everyone is progressing, and we have that continuum with regard to our safety.

Concerning auditing, there was a comment about Transport Canada. I can't wait for an outside party to come in and audit. They do a lot of audits with regard to CN, but we have a very robust, very aggressive plan with regard to auditing.

Jim Vena talked about the 400,000-plus testing that we do on our employees. Mr. Creel talked earlier about those human behaviour elements. Those are issues we're always on the lookout for: whether our rules, our policies, and the instructions are being adhered to, and so forth. It provides a lot of feedback for the employees. We talk about that input. Those generate a lot of discussions between management and the employees, and those are very important to us. We learn a lot through our testing, from feedback from the employees as we provide feedback in coaching to those.

On auditing with regard to terminals, when I talk about ensuring that terminals are on the right track, if I see a little blip in the screen that someone is having difficulty, I'll parachute in, surgically, teams to ensure that we get a sense of what's going on, how to rightsize it, to ensure the effectiveness of what we have.

With regard to safety plans, we start out with plans at the beginning of the year. Everyone develops their safety plans in their terminals. I personally review them, but they have to be dynamic enough. If something has changed and so forth, we need to also ensure that we're shoring up those areas. That's a form of auditing for us.

We have many levels. For example, for dangerous goods I have dangerous goods officers. We also audit some of our load sites. We have very detailed inspections that we look for at the loading sites. We are very active on that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Mr. Sullivan for five minutes.

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

Thank you to our witnesses.

Part of the safety management system is to do a risk analysis. You must have done a risk analysis of the effect, the risk, the change in risk, between transporting 500 railcars of dangerous goods, oil, per year, to 140,000 railcars. I understand that CN wants to double it by 2015. CN currently carries about 60,000 and they want to be at 120,000.

Can we get a copy of that risk assessment?

[Jim Vena]

Did we do a specific risk assessment on...?

We do a risk assessment on the totality of what we move, and the changes and the flows. We don't tie it...because there are changes in flows. Depending on where they're headed, it makes a big difference.

We do have some risk assessments that we've performed in corridors, and we'd absolutely be more than willing to have people take a look at those risk assessments.

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

Was there also a risk assessment done when you and CP both abandoned the Ottawa Valley line and therefore drove all of this stuff through heavily populated areas?