Transport committee  If I may say, from a personal perspective, we're railway workers too and and we live in the communities. Every time there's a derailment in a community, every time there's a rail story in a community, people look to us for answers. You need to understand, as I said earlier, the

Transport committee  A number of working groups have come out of that. Some of them have made some progress, some of them have made no progress, and some of them have been dismantled. It's a frustrating road ahead to get some of these activities moving. Fatigue management is now two and a half or t

Transport committee  You did, but I will let Christine handle it first.

Transport committee  From Unifor's perspective, from a mechanical perspective, if someone makes a call to Transport and it deals with Bredenbury or Melville, Saskatchewan, you have to know there are only one or two people there, so it has to be one of two. I can go to the recent situation in Lethbr

Transport committee  Let me say quickly on this point that while focusing on this relaying of information to municipalities is all great stuff, our focus should be on making sure that the railways are operating safely and that the cars stay on the tracks.

Transport committee  I have a very short comment. When I look at fatigue management, I also want to look at freight car safety regulations and other things like that, where there's almost a similar dynamic at play.

Transport committee  When it comes to freight car safety maintenance, we can look at how it's different. In the airline industry, when an airline mechanic says, “This plane ain't leaving, because the bearings are bad on that nose wheel”, do you want to know what happens? It doesn't leave. And do you

Transport committee  Currently now it's very much like the regulations, as we're in the hands of the railway. In terms of the protection, we really have to rely on the role that the union plays, if there there happens to be any retribution or retaliation. The nice thing is that typically the railways

Transport committee  Just to supplement that point, there is the 1-800 number in terms of secure desk, and when a call is made it doesn't take long for the railway itself to find out—going to Phil's point—who made the call, because they know who's scheduled there and who was working and who was on th

Transport committee  I wholeheartedly agree. Both Don and I spend a lot of time responding to exemptions from rules. Currently now the mechanism in the industry is that the railways write the rules. As someone whispered in my ear, Colonel Sanders is keeping an eye on the chickens. The railways are w

Transport committee  Excuse me, it's Brian Stevens here. If I may, on this one—

Transport committee  First off, one of the things that we're here advocating as well, as it's in line with the intent of the committee, is that we want the public to have confidence in safe railway transportation. All of us are railroaders. We have more iron in our blood than what we could get from

Transport committee  Just to top off on the contraction, when that started back in 1995-96 and all of these rail lines got converted into walking paths, what happened then was that the issue of grade separation increased because we had more trains going through these high-density areas. So that autom

Transport committee  All right, just quickly, then. CN and CP, in our view, have flipped. CP has taken a step back; they're one. CN has advanced to two. TC is still at three, and VIA is at four, and improving.

Transport committee  We're talking about fatigue management and there's a working group involved in that now. We're looking at the different sciences in terms of crew fatigue. I think what's important would be to have schedules as opposed to the system where the crews are on call and once they're on