Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for giving us the opportunity to speak to this committee. At VIA Rail, mental health is paramount to the overall health and safety of employees, and we take it very seriously. VIA Rail has adopted the national standard for psychological health and safety in the workplace, a set of voluntary guidelines promoting employee psychological health. We're also participating in a study by the Mental Health Commission of Canada.
Now, more specific to our higher risk employees, who are our locomotive engineers, in 2010 we were noticing some significant, long disabilities following critical incidents. Critical incidents are typically due to somebody committing suicide in front of one of our trains or a level crossing accident, where the locomotive engineers not only get subjected to the incident, but also have to, occasionally, offer care and supervision at the incident while awaiting the authorities to come to support them.
We were having some significant issues with their mental health and their length of disabilities. In 2011, in co-operation with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference union and Université du Québec à Montréal,, one of the doctors of psychology assisted us in creating a help protocol. We call this the critical incident support guidelines to operating crews, and the intent of this protocol is to normalize the situation for them as much as we possibly can, to treat them at—