Transport Committee on April 3rd, 2008

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Winter and Mr. Wilson, for coming. I think your comments have been as much for us to have documented as for us to learn about. Actually, I'm impressed with your attitude about where you put safety and environmental concerns.

One of the things you just talked about, and I was going to ask about, is building trust and outreach with the communities. I was involved as a mayor of our municipality a number of years ago when we did the actual mock disaster with all the emergency people. One of the things that struck me at my first debriefing after what I called a major derailment in my municipality was the attitude to learn and then take that out to the community. We need to get rid of perceptions and put realities into place about safety and what that actually is in our communities. I would recognize that for you.

Another one of the things I was keen on was that you gave full access to the panel. I think that spoke wisely of your initiatives also.

We talked about where we are on a scale of getting from number one to ten. In this case I guess it's to five. Somewhere in there you've agreed with the panel where you see—sort of where number three is—safety as a risk management tool. At number four, basically you see it as an opportunity, and you leverage that with your economic benefit that you can get from your companies. A trigger goes at some point in time where if you do it right, it actually isn't a cost, it is an opportunity to be good for your business and good for the community, and then at the end, it's fully integrated.

You've been going for about 10 or more years, you mentioned, and I look at your chart here of what your safety employees say. I'm wondering, over that 10 years—you have a little way to go, you're at three or four—how do you plan on getting to that next stage and what sorts of goals do you have to get there?

[Brock Winter]

It's a very good question.

We challenged ourselves. You get to a plateau, and how do you get to the next level of sustained improvement? I have to tell you that we've been investigating a lot around the philosophy of just culture. Again, the just culture approach isn't one of discipline; it's really working with all employees to understand why human errors occur. I'm not going to suggest to you for a moment that the field of human factors and understanding what a human is thinking at the time of a human factor accident isn't extremely complex, but I do think that we at CP need to move to that level of understanding before we can get to the next level of safety culture.

So again it does come back to this—and don't misunderstand what I'm saying, it's going to be a very difficult journey here—to getting employees to come forward without the fear of some type of penalty. We're moving down that path. We're looking at very different approaches to make that happen, one being the close call that I referred to earlier. But clearly, from our manager's perspective, in his or her tool kit they have had the discipline capability in our world. It's based on the Brown military system of managing people. That's where the system came from. So frankly, to educate all of our employees, including our managers, over time.... Where it's warranted, we're moving away from the natural inclination to go to discipline and trying to get our managers and our employees and our workplace health and safety committees to really get to the bottom of the whys.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

How many employees do you have?

[Brock Winter]

We have approximately 15,000.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

When you're moving onto the safety management system, you're moving ahead. You indicated earlier that before it got tagged with that name you were into the process.

One of the recommendations was that you move away from rail safety inspector and the audit and you have one person. I guess it's called the rail safety officer now. How are you implementing that? How are you engaging the people to accept? Are you offering training? Does it take a lot of training or upgrade of education?

Help me understand what you've done to accomplish that, or if you have yet.

[Brock Winter]

I think the railway safety officer is the new inspector title Transport Canada is looking at, not the railways. I do agree with Mr. Lewis' and the panel's recommendations with regard to the training and requirements for Transport as well.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

You're on a steady increase in terms of acceptance by your employees of what they feel you're doing to improve safety. You do this every two years. Do you see that continually moving at about 7% a year or whatever it is? At the end of 2007, would you have that graph still going in the same direction?

[Brock Winter]

I sure hope so. I believe the actions we're taking will enable us to do that. I'm confident we'll continue to see continual progress. If we don't, from my perspective we'll need to regroup and look at why it's not continuing to trend up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you, Mr. Shipley. Your time is up.

I promised I would have you out of here at one sharp, and it is.

We appreciate your time and hope you have a safe trip home.

Thank you.

For the committee's interest, on Tuesday, April 8, we'll be dealing with railway safety again, with the union representatives. I want you to start thinking about Thursday, April 10. We will be going in camera to discuss how we want to present the report as either an addendum to the book that's out right now or as an official report from the committee.

The meeting is adjourned.