Let me approach it a little differently.
The safety management system, or SMS, is used in the airline industry, in aviation, and apparently it's being applied within the railway system in Canada as well. It's a new level of accountability, a new level of safety that's imposed under existing regulation.
I will go back to the comments made by our witnesses. We asked them to compare the safety environment within CN versus CP. Mr. Rhodes responded, after stating that CP apparently had changed their management style and was finding out that they were much more successful, that:
No, CN has gone in the opposite direction. They're very adversarial. I call it the poisoned work environment, because that's what it is. Nobody wants to go to work there. Everybody's counting the days, the months, and the years until they're gone, until they're out of there. That's not the way it was, and that's not the way it was at B.C. Rail.
So here it's very clear. We're dealing with safety management systems where the front-line employees are supposed to be involved in identifying deficiencies, finding safety defects. And yet the response from the employees is not, hey, we're working together with management here. Instead, they're afraid for their jobs.
In fact, the same witnesses confirmed that they're afraid of getting fired if they identify deficiencies in any of the rolling stock you have.