You were given earlier two submissions. One was a submission to the standing committee, a cursory review that we did; also, you were provided with our comments with respect to the RSA panel recommendations. We have comments on every recommendation, I believe, that was provided to you. That's the submission I'm going to discuss right now.
The CAW of Canada welcomes the opportunity to provide the Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities with its comments concerning the Rail Safety Act review recently released to the public. The CAW is Canada's largest private sector union, representing over 260,000 members in more than 2,100 workplaces across the country. We have experience with federal as well as provincial railways.
Some 30,000 federal sector workers are represented by the CAW. This figure includes about 11,000 rail workers. Most work for the large private-sector employers, such as CN and CP Rail. Others work for VIA Rail, and yet others work for smaller railway enterprises such as the ONR, TransCanada Switching or OmniTrax, and Great Canadian Rail Tours or Rocky Mountain Vacations, all of which are federal enterprises. A small number of our members also work for provincial railways.
The CAW rail division includes the former Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of Canada or BRCC, the former Shopcraft Council or CCRSU, and the former Canadian Brotherhood of Railway Transportation and General Workers, the CBRT&GW.
The duties of the approximately 11,000 CAW rail workers include repairing and maintenance of freight car equipment and locomotives, servicing passenger cars, building locomotive consists, crew calling, customer service, operating locomotives, and performing conductors' duties on trains on smaller railways.
In the view of the CAW, this makes us more than qualified to speak with authority with respect to rail safety. In our cursory review of the report of the Railway Safety Act Review Advisory Panel, the CAW has found what we consider to be an outright bias of the panel. The report's first pages thank the railway lobby group, the Railway Association of Canada or RAC, for its input. The panel fails to make mention of any other group that took time to also make extensive submissions to the panel.
In addition to thanking the RAC, the panel pointedly quotes from parts of the RAC submission in its report, but again fails to quote from any other submission made to the panel. Contrary to the panel's report, which in our view tends to downplay the state of rail safety, the CAW believes the state of rail safety is much more precarious than the report would have you believe. In our view, the report has failed in its purpose and mandate.
The CAW has reviewed the recommendations of the RSA review advisory panel and offers our comments in italics after each recommendation of the panel. You have all had this ahead of time. If you want, I can go through every recommendation; if not, we can leave it there and move on.