I have a fairly good example of what this would be.
If someone has a rules violation, say an engineer or one of the maintenance employees who has track protection, and he violates the CROR, the Canadian rail operating rules, and nobody knows--he doesn't tell anybody--how do you correct what caused him to break it? How do you correct where the downfall was, where the miscommunication was, and where the problem was? He won't report it, because even though it had no effect, he caught it. Say he backed up over the signal or re-railed his truck back onto the track. Nobody ever knows and he can get away with it, but he may not report it for fear that he's going to get disciplined.
I will tell you, they will discipline you right up. We have a Brown system of discipline. It's a quantum discipline system where it's progressive, and if you hit 60 Brown points, “Brownies” we call them, you're dismissed. So they'll get people sitting at 45 or 50 Brownies and basically they'll have to do whatever they're told to do, because 10 more Brownies and you're gone. It's very scary out there for our guys. They could lose their jobs in an instant, so they don't report these things.
If we have non-punitive reporting...if they blow by a signal, say, and back up—it wouldn't happen in a train because the RCT would see it. But if they did it in a high-rail vehicle and backed up again, and they reported it, then they can come out and inspect it. They can look for a root cause. They can find out why they did what they did. They can look for trends, and we'll prevent the ones where people get killed. People get killed out there, lots of them--our members, CP's employees, CN's employees, and contractors. That's why having it non-punitive is important.
Anonymous reporting directly to Transport Canada is important. Let's say you see something on the railway that you think is a systemic failure. We had one with angle bars, where wheels were hitting the angle bars that held the track together. They're not meant for that. We found that this was becoming more and more common. We realized that the railways were going right to the extremes of the wear on their wheels and on the track, and it was causing these angle bars to get hit by the wheels. We reported it to Luc Bourdon. He looked into it, and, yes, they found that they have to move down the sill of the angle bar and they have to be a little more careful with their clearances. But what happened first—and I don't mean to go on here—was that our membership saw it because they are on the ground and they brought it to their supervisor. He said, “No problem. Take a grinder out there and grind off the mark where the wheel hit it.” That was his solution.
They came to us and said, “This has to be wrong, a wheel flange hitting pig iron at 60 miles an hour has to be causing some damage”, and they started finding pieces of wheel across the system. They'd find little pieces of wheel flange. Wheels were breaking down. The latest derailment in Buckskin they say was because of a wheel bearing.
We took it on from there, like I said to Luc, but if our guys had been able to report it right away to Transport Canada rather than to their supervisor, we might have found this problem a long sooner. That's why we need it.
In our opinion, you cannot tell a company that holds your livelihood in its hands that it's making mistakes again and again, and you can't just go to Transport Canada and report them, with your name out, if it's going to cost them a lot of money. You just can't do it. That fear is in your head that they're going to get you.