Thank you.
Gentlemen, thank you for coming. As you can appreciate, when this committee was formed, one of our prime goals was safety in marine, air, and rail. We were aware of problems that were developing in terms of an increase in the number of derailments in 2005. The minister at that time under the Liberal government, Jean Lapierre, as a result of the spike of incidents that you acknowledged in 2005, Mr. Creel, ordered two studies. One was the phase one study, which was the targeted inspection of your operations in terms of the details of the safety incidents. The second was phase two, which was the audit of the safety management system you had implemented to determine, as you mentioned, the difference between employees and process.
In the concerns I have in phase one--and I'll go through the questions and you can take note and then decide who wishes to respond. A lot of my questions will be related to western Canada, so, Mr. Marshall, it may be more appropriate for you to respond.
On page 6 of the phase one report it refers to the contributing factors to your main-line derailments. It talks about two of the major contributing factors having been track and equipment. It says, for example, that 37% of the main-line track derailments were identified with equipment being the contributing factor. This is where CN is both the track owner and the train operator. It also refers to track conditions as being the contributing factor in 27% of the derailments listed.
When we get into page 14, a little farther up, and then page 16, we're talking about two of the issues relating to equipment. One is on page 14; it talks about freight cars. They're talking about a defect rate of 20.6% of a little over 3,000 freight cars that were inspected. They talk about a variety of things, but some of those are defective breaks, break issues that create additional risk.
The other issue on page 16 refers to locomotives, and 53.9%, almost 54%, of the 232 locomotives again had safety defect rates assigned between 32% and 68.9%--again, misaligned break shoes, breaks being head worn, excessive piston break travel. They're not all extremely serious, but what concerns me in having read the report is that even with the significant number of what might be called relatively minor issues, it indicates perhaps a lack of attention overall. If the little things aren't being attended to, then it reflects that likely the big things aren't being attended to.
The other issue that was mentioned there, on page 17, was the consists. In the presentation you provided for us today, in the background material you talked about wanting to work with local authorities, municipal authorities, hazmat teams, and the fire and police services that have to respond when there is a serious derailment. One of the issues is there's a 14% violation rate in having accurate or inaccurate consists. The consist, as I understand it in this context, is saying what's in the train and where it is in the train, so that if there is a derailment, local authorities are able to determine are there particular products they should be concerned about, and where are they located within the train. And we've got a 14% inaccuracy list, or incomplete list. That's worrying to me, for example, as a former mayor for a community in north Vancouver, where we have hazardous goods going through our community very close to residential properties on a daily basis.
When we go into phase two, which is the safety management systems, there were a number of things that were of concern to me. You're familiar with them. I've heard you talk about in your presentation the commitment to safety that you have as a company. But it talks here about a disconnect between senior management and front-line supervisors and employees in understanding management's commitment to safety. So there was the commitment, there was the talk being made, but the question is whether that was being walked--if you want to call it that--at a track level. The responsibility of the management of a company if they have policies, if they have goals, is to ensure that they're not just articulated but in fact are being enacted and being followed through by employees. It talks about the need for a comprehensive review of safety performance by senior management, and one that's not primarily based on American standards, but Canadian standards.
It says here:
...it was found that the evaluation of safety performance at the senior management levels is heavily focused on accidents that meet the United States Federal Railway Administration (FRA) reportable accident criteria. The FRA accident numbers only represent a small portion of the actual number of CN accidents in Canada.
That reflects back onto the evaluation of the standard of the monetary level, which I think in the U.S. is $7,700, so items that are below that are not reported, yet they can still be significant as to safety. It could be the handles, the gradings the workers stand on, the locomotives. So I have concerns about that.
It talks about how data from day-to-day operational monitoring systems could be used more frequently to trigger formal risk assessments. What they suggest is that the data is being gathered but it's not being used to trigger the required assessments that should be ongoing. It talks about how more thorough tracking of details is necessary to improve the management of risk mitigation strategies. Again, it says, “the audit team could not find documented details describing the risk mitigation controls”. This is contrary to the intent of CN's corrective action, safety and measurement plan--SMS plan. It also says, “The effectiveness of CN’s safety culture improvement initiatives needs to be reviewed”.
Again, it's the question of the focus on training, involvement, communications, and coaching were reported as not being effectively implemented. This was raised most predominantly in the mechanical services department, and we have written testimony and information contained in these reports that indicate that this is a concern of employees being penalized in fact for reporting injuries, for example, that they may have as a result of equipment that is not up to level--