Marijuana diminishes vigilance, concentration, depth perception, and the ability to perform automated tasks. It slows reaction time, and delayed reactions can occur over prolonged periods. These are just a few of its deleterious effects, which pose significant safety risks and increase the risk of injury to users and those around them in a live environment like a rail yard.
Legalizing marijuana will normalize its consumption, increase its availability, and provide greater opportunities for people to consume it. As an industry, we have no interest in regulating what people do on their own time, but as employers we have an obligation to ensure employees are fit to work and not impaired by any substance, legal or not, that may pose a risk to safe operations.
There is no legislation at this time mandating drug or alcohol testing for any position in Canada's transportation industry. This is left to individual railways, whose efforts are frequently subject to legal challenges. This creates an uneven patchwork across the industry, which is detrimental to safety.
Canada's overall approach to the prevention of workplace impairment in safety sensitive environments is reactive instead of proactive. For example, employees showing signs of impairment can be tested for reasonable cause, but this depends on pure observation, and drugs frequently provide few, and sometimes no, visible signs of impairment detectable before an accident happens. Now, employees can be tested in post-accident settings, to be sure, but this means that other screening methods have failed and that safety was seriously compromised.
In rail operations this can entail very serious consequences, which I don't think need to be overstated, for employees themselves, their co-workers, the public, and the environment. Marijuana is the drug most frequently found in employees who fail post-accident tests.
We are pleased that this bill proposes strengthening the Criminal Code by making it an offence to operate rail equipment while exceeding certain blood drug concentrations. However, while this may punish the offender, it remains a reactive measure that will not prevent an accident from occurring. In a context where marijuana is legalized, greater preventive focus is required.
Drug tests, including random tests, are required by law in the United States. The U.S. Department of Transportation considers random testing an effective deterrent, and indeed U.S. law lists deterrence as the purpose of random testing. In our industry's experience, it is very effective.
Both Canadian class I railways and some of the RAC's other members operate on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Canadian courts have long accepted that Canadian employees can validly be subject to U.S. random testing rules when they cross into the United States. The Supreme Court of Canada has likewise accepted that random testing can be permissible in circumstances posing enhanced risks to safety.
This bill acknowledges the need for preventive measures, notably by authorizing mandatory screenings at roadside stops. This is the right time to harmonize the Canadian and U.S. approaches to rail safety by adopting shared preventive screening standards. The legal framework is there, and Parliament's leadership is needed to establish a consistent, reliable regulatory framework for Canada's transportation sector, including establishing a per se limit for deemed impairment, approving a reliable instant-reading testing device to screen for drug impairment, and mandating the preventive monitoring of employees' fitness for duty, notably through random testing.
Thank you, and we will be pleased to answer to the best of our knowledge in either official language any questions you may have.