Transport Committee on April 3rd, 2008

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Go ahead, Mr. Bell.

[Don Bell, Liberal, North Vancouver, BC]

First of all, I'd like to again apologize to CP. You were set up with your overhead projector and ready to go on a presentation to this committee, and because of an unrelated debate we got into, you weren't able to. I appreciate the fact that you're back.

I was one of the presenters before the panel. The same day I was there in Vancouver making my comments, the president of CP Rail was there. He made it very clear at that time that safety was their number one concern, without any reservations. I was impressed with that.

You're aware of the testimony we had from Mr. Lewis, the chair of that committee, in relating to Mr. Watson's question. He thought CP was in the mid range: “They embrace it, but as Faye Ackermans says, it's a fragile thing. You have to be moving along and bringing everybody under the tent.”

We have your acknowledgement and your comments that this is a priority; you're not where you could be or should be, perhaps, but you're well along, certainly, relative to the others. VIA had a better recommendation or opinion, and it was an off-the-cuff one-to-five response to Mr. Watson's question that brought it; nevertheless, I'm generally pleased with CP's approach and would encourage you to continue to ratchet up your efforts. I'm impressed with what I see here.

I would just reiterate for you the importance of addressing the employee fatigue issue, which we heard in testimony was a major problem for the employees. Employees are under pressure trying to operate these large trains with two people while having the responsibility to be alert and aware, and we know that in the Hinton case and in other examples, fatigue was the problem. You're addressing many of the technological and technical areas of the track and the cars, but I think the human factor is really important.

The role of health and safety employee committees again was something we heard was being ignored in many cases—not necessarily with CP, but I'm highlighting that as an area you need to maintain.

During the testimony—and we had phone-in testimony at one point—we heard that CP did a pretty good job in terms of community relations. You've identified proximity issues as an area of concern. That's going to be multi-jurisdictional; it's going to be regional governments, municipal governments, and the railways. When we heard the testimony for British Columbia, we heard comments that CP at least returned the phone calls and had people come out—I'm referring to Langley, Richmond, and New Westminster—so I think your community relations people are to be congratulated. Again, more can be done, because the communities generally felt they were not listened to as well as they could be or should be by the railroads, but they made particular comment that CP made the effort.

I would just remind you that, as you stated, we're talking about the safety of the railway workers, we're talking about the safety of the public, and we're talking about the safety of the environment. We've seen in Lake Wabamun and the Cheakamus River the disastrous effects that a derailment can have. We have loss of fish stocks for maybe 50 years in the Cheakamus River. The environmental impact is not only on nature but also on the economy, because those fish-producing streams are important to the economy of the fishing industry.

We're also concerned, obviously, about damage to adjacent property. We've seen what can happen to communities built along the railway tracks in some of the pictures of train wrecks in the past.

I would be interested in getting something from you. You indicated that we didn't have the time here—and we certainly don't—to comment on the recommendations, but are there any that you in any way disagree with in this report? I would appreciate getting that in writing to this committee. As well, if there is any area where you think the panel maybe hasn't gone far enough, I would appreciate those comments as well.

Other than that, you heard my comments and questions a few minutes ago to CN here, so I'm not going to take the time to repeat those. This was a concern because of what was happening. Certainly in my case it was prompted by what I saw happening with CN, but we've had derailments and problems from CP as well. Those are going to occur by the very nature of railway operations, but they've got to be minimized to the maximum extent.

As a result of the initial motion, the investigation by this committee, and the minister's decision to appoint a panel, I'm hoping we'll see an improvement—a significant improvement—in rail safety in Canada.

Thank you for appearing.

[Brock Winter]

Thank you. I appreciate your comments.

We're not satisfied with our safety performance, either on train accidents or personal...and I would say it's a journey. We've made great progress and we have more to go. We're very focused through our disciplined process. We're very much supportive of the safety management system.

I can tell you that we've been at the safety management system before it was coined a safety management system, starting in 1995. At that time, if you went out on the property and asked our employees to give you the specific 12 elements of the safety management system, they couldn't have given you the specific terminologies, but I think you would have found, as Mr. Lewis did, that they could give you many of the elements in their own words. I think that's an indication of driving that through the health and safety committee process to understand what we're trying to achieve from the bottom up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Go ahead, Monsieur Laframboise.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Thank you.

I may go back to the safety management system before we're through, but here's my first question.

You have electronic equipment to check your track and your equipment. How many kilometres of track do you own? How much equipment do you have? How long does it take you to inspect your network using the electronic equipment you currently have?

[Brock Winter]

Thank you for the question.

Our network is approximately 14,000 miles. On any given day, as of today, we have 58,000 rail cars moving. We have over 500 trains moving across our network in Canada and in the United States as we speak. Under regulation we are required to inspect visually every 48 hours, and we have testing equipment, including the track evaluation car that I showed you, plus other technologies, such as Sperry. Depending on the density of traffic and its location on our network, we have certain standards to which we test certain parts of our network up to once a month with these special pieces of equipment.

It's very much a combination of visual regulatory inspection combined with electronic inspection on a regular basis. Using that data, we then target our replacement and repair activities on a proactive basis.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

That's fine.

What electronic equipment do you have to check track in Quebec?

[Brock Winter]

In Quebec we have two track evaluation cars. We contract out what we call our rail testing with a company by the name of Sperry Rail, Inc. We have literally hundreds of devices. I don't know specifically how many we have in the province of Quebec, but we have literally hundreds of wayside detection devices across Canadian Pacific.

I could get that information for you.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

I would very much appreciate it if you sent it to me. Are you currently making any acquisitions? Is there a budget? You've no doubt made plans. Do you have all the equipment you need? Do you have a medium-term project to acquire other equipment or do you have everything you need in the way of electronic inspection equipment?

[Brock Winter]

We are constantly looking at new technologies and new equipment. As part of our planning process, we believe, as I said earlier, we will see an escalation of technology capability. In terms of moving forward on this as per Mr. Lewis' recommendation, we believe that with the help of Transport there is more opportunity to move this faster. Regardless of that, in many cases we at CP far exceed the minimum standards that currently exist in the regulations in terms of track inspection. That applies to both human inspection and to the use of new technology.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

I'm going to focus on one specific recommendation, Recommendation 40, which reads as follows:

Railway companies should file annual environmental management plans and regular compliance audits with Transport Canada. These plans should address, among other issues, pollution of railway property (i.e., yards and railway rights-of-way).

We noticed in the report, especially starting at pages 147 and 148 of the English version and pages 168 and 169 of the French version, that there are environmental problems that you still haven't adequately solved. That somewhat summarizes the comment. Do you agree with Recommendation 40, that is that there should be a planning process and that you should have to file an environmental management plan and proper audits every year?

[Brock Winter]

We do extensive environmental planning, and yes, we do agree with the recommendation. We would like to explore further with Transport and the committee and the advisory panel as well, to potentially strengthen those recommendations. But we believe that environment is equally important to incident safety. So yes, we do agree with that.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

I'll finish with the safety management system. As you know—my colleagues mentioned this earlier—you are in the middle of the safety management system scale. One of the problems with SMSs is that they've been around for seven years. They've been in effect since 2001. You added that you had already started in 1995 at Canadian Pacific. You must be aware that the finding in this report is that SMSs haven't produced the results they should have produced. So there is a safety management problem and a problem with the entire concept, even at Canadian Pacific. I hope you are aware of that and that you want to improve. I hope you are aware of the finding that Mr. Lewis made in his report.

[Brock Winter]

I'm absolutely aware of Mr. Lewis' comments. As I said earlier, it's a continuous journey. The rating of between a three and a four is something that I think is an accurate assessment of where Canadian Pacific is at right now.

We believe that our long-term output safety matrix, where we want to be in terms of the number of safety accidents and personal injuries and environmental situations.... We have a very, very aggressive target in our multi-year plan, and the only way we're going to get to that level of result.... Again, inputs are most important, and we believe we absolutely need to move to this greater interface and effectiveness with our health and safety committees.

We talked earlier about encouraging employees to come forward. We very much want to do that and to continue to work on building trust with our employee base, both with our managers and our employees. Our managers are members of those health and safety committees. They sit on those committees.

We, at CP, are moving to a pilot. It happens to be in the United States, in Wisconsin. It's a close-call reporting pilot with regard to train accidents. We're the second railway in North America, after the Union Pacific, to be involved in this close-call reporting pilot. We're very proud of that. Again, that's about having our employees report—unfortunately, to a third party at this time—and that third party will provide that information back to the railways. Again, it's all around close-call reporting.

I'm not satisfied that the level of trust is where it needs to be. We have 126 years of history at Canadian Pacific. But I do think we're moving in the right direction in piloting different techniques to encourage employees to bring forth potential close-call incidents without the fear of being disciplined.

That being said, I must admit there are circumstances where there's negligence or wilful disregard for rules and regulations and practices. We need to think about how we're going to deal with that in terms of the immunity question, because it's not an easy, simple issue to deal with. But we are working through that, and we hope to learn a lot from this particular pilot sponsored by the federal railway administration in the United States. Of course, we're very interested in doing likewise here in Canada with Transport Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Masse....

Mr. Jean.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

On a point of order--I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Masse--Mr. Laframboise asked for a breakdown of the safety equipment available in Quebec. Since he's going to provide it to the committee, I'm wondering whether we could have a breakdown of the amount of track per province and that breakdown of the equipment per province. I think it would be helpful to see the correlation with accidents.

[Brock Winter]

Absolutely. No problem.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

Mr. Masse.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

I apologize. After I ask my questions, I have to be somewhere. I'll leave prior to you, but thank you for being here.

I want to go to your chart here and get your interpretation. According to the statistics between Canada and the United States, there's a significant difference with regard to accidents. Also, it appears that since 1997 you've levelled off at a certain point and you haven't been able to get beyond that point. Is there a particular reason? Do you have some insight as to what needs to be done to go even further, if it's even possible in your opinion?

[Brock Winter]

That's a very good question. Again, these are frequencies. But let me talk about the actual number of accidents and the difference between FRA reporting....

I would agree with Mr. Miller's comments in terms of recommendations. We can go further on the panel's recommendations on the data capturing and how we use the data. Frankly, the FRA data we are required to report in the United States gives us much greater granularity around accidents and the cause of accidents.

For clarification, an FRA accident is an accident that roughly costs more than $8,500 to rectify, not including lighting damage. That's just the cost of repair. Anything less than that is a non-FRA train accident.

The chart on FRA train accidents in 2007 that you see represents 90 accidents on the Canadian Pacific Railway that cost more than $8,500 to rectify. Of those 90 accidents, about 45 were in yards and 45 were on line of road. This is the tip of the iceberg. When you go below the iceberg to be more consistent with the TSB reporting, there are approximately 1,100 non-FRA accidents—the accidents that cost less than $8,500 to rectify.

To your question of whether we think we have levelled off, when you look at the total accident community, of the 1,200 accidents, including the FRAs, I believe you'll see a trend of reduction there. And I believe we can bring that level of accidents down further. As you see, in 2007, according to this matrix, we essentially had two accidents per million train miles.

Our objective within four years is to get to one accident per million train miles, so essentially to see another 100% improvement in that level. Is that going to be difficult? I believe it is. It's an aggressive target. It is one that is discussed and set with our board of directors, and they're encouraging us. So the next question is how you do it. I do believe that the panel's recommendations, some of the technologies I shared with you, and the human factor of what we're talking about are the key drivers in how we're going to drive those accidents to a much lower level than we see today.

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

In terms of accountability to get there--and I asked this to Mr. Miller--will it just be on the employees, or will it actually go to management, all the way to the top as well? What is the culture of CP to bring accountability to successfully making those objectives for everyone, and if they can't be reached, what is the next stage?

[Brock Winter]

I can tell you that there is absolute joint accountability. I hesitate to talk about incentives, but I can tell you that my president has incentives, I have incentives, and our employees have “gain share” proposals in our collective agreements. We're all incented to the same goal of reducing both personal and train accident safety....

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Okay.

If I can move then to the report, the public outreach component is very important. Unfortunately, in my riding, CP has had a number of different land use conflicts with the municipality and residents and so forth. But there have also been some positive things, the most recent being the allocation time to have training by the fire services for hazardous materials and dangerous goods.

Can you highlight where you're going with that philosophy? I understand it took a long time to get this. It was very successful and very much appreciated. A lot of different, very dangerous chemicals could be exposed, not only in the immediate adjacent area, but beyond that. What other municipalities are you doing this with, and what is your plan to deal with hazardous materials?

In the United States they actually have laws that prevent certain materials from going into larger municipalities--for example, Cleveland and Washington and so forth. There are restrictions. They've also been able to reduce having such materials, for instance in the Dayton and the Miami area. They moved chlorine off and substituted another substance for a pollution control centre.

What's your plan in working with municipalities, the types of materials you're preventing from even having to go to destination, or having very strong prevention plans or accident control when it does happen?

[Brock Winter]

There are two questions in there.

First, I'd just like to say that most dangerous commodities, which we call toxic inhalation commodities—chlorine, anhydrous ammonia, etc.—today are not restricted to any location. Restrictions and regulations are being developed, as we speak, in the United States, and we're working very closely with Transport to implement something similar to that in Canada. So I think we can and are taking precautions with regard to handling dangerous commodities. That's number one.

Number two, with regard to community outreach, we see that as very important. In my remarks I said that we have an extensive outreach program. Last year we conducted approximately 30 tabletop exercises with various communities—not the same communities. Obviously we traverse some 900 communities across Canadian Pacific, and we're working extensively on a graduated basis with those communities to ensure that we know each other, the protocols, and the emergency responders, and that we do the training. We find that helps immensely.

It also helps immensely, by the way, on proximity issues, just because of the relationship we have. We actually conducted five to six mock disasters, which we do on an annual basis with various communities, again on a rotating basis, to ensure that we literally go through a very detailed mock disaster as if a real one did occur. Then we do detailed follow-up and an audit after that to make sure all of the parties were comfortable with how we reacted. It's a critical part of our community outreach on a go-forward basis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Shipley.