Transport Committee on April 1st, 2014

[Kirby Jang]

Certainly, in terms of ERAPs, they are based on risk assessments. We do know the properties of petroleum, crude oil, liquid hydrocarbons...also have variations in it.

Obviously the ERAPs are approved by the regulator. Our expectation is that those risks would be looked into, and it's a good point whether they are separate or perhaps encompassed within the same ERAP, with possibly the idea that we're looking at the same types of resources and of the expertise required, whether it's, for example, packing group 2, packing group 1, or packing group 3 risk involved.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Braid, you have seven minutes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Ms. Tadros and your team, for being here today and for the important work that you are doing on behalf of Canadians.

Ms. Tadros, in your opening statement you mention that the second recommendation of the TSB deals with the way railways plan their transportation. You go on to say that this involves a comprehensive system-wide review of many variables. I want to ask you to elaborate a little bit on what those variables are and on the complexity of this particular recommendation.

[Wendy Tadros]

There are really three elements to this recommendation. The first is group planning. You take a look at your route and choose the safest route over which to carry those dangerous goods. If there's only one route, then you move to the second element, which is an examination of train operations to make sure that the operations on that route, whether it's the chosen route or the only available route, have the highest safety standards.

We would be looking to the railways to look at such things as track-side testing, speeds, ensuring that the equipment is of the highest standard, things like that, to make sure that they're playing the A game, really, on those routes.

Then what we've asked them to do is not make it static. You don't just put this in place and then move goods over that route for the next 20 years. We want them to follow up with risk assessments on an ongoing basis to make sure that the control measures they have put in place are working. You can have an accident with the same consequences as Lac-Mégantic that is caused by something totally different.

What you need to do is bring down the risk in the whole system that there are going to be accidents, derailments, for instance. You want to bring down that whole risk.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

To what extent are railway companies doing this now on their own?

[Wendy Tadros]

Some railway companies are, particularly Canadian National. There are some requirements in the United States called OT-55. If a large Canadian railway operates in the United States all the time, for those operations they have to comply with the requirements. Canadian National has said they are going to bring those requirements north of the border and implement them in Canada. We are asking them to go a little bit further than OT-55.

In terms of the concept, I think we've received positive feedback.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

I want to move on and ask you about safety management systems. In your opening statement you indicate that Canada's major railways and a number of short-line railways have been working to implement SMS and have taken significant steps. Then you go on to say that 12 years on, many of the systems they've implemented are not yet mature.

Why is that?

[Wendy Tadros]

Madam Fox.

[Kathy Fox]

As I started to indicate earlier, some companies may—and I'm not talking about any one company, but just in general—take a very bureaucratic approach to safety management systems, assuming that the documents are just a manual; whereas in true safety management, the best principles of safety management boil down to having processes in place that identify hazards, having very good internal incident reporting systems and follow-up on incidents before they lead to accidents, and having a positive safety culture in the company.

Some organizations, maybe partly as a result of the infrastructure to support it, of the internal knowledge within the company, or of whatever their priorities are, may not be moving as far along the continuum as they could be or should be or as we would like to see this far in.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Generally speaking, though, do you agree that the introduction of the SMS some years ago and the continued evolution of that system is an important pillar of rail safety in Canada?

[Kathy Fox]

Absolutely. We'll never know the accidents we didn't have because of safety management systems, so sometimes it's hard to measure the effect over a short period of time, but over a longer period of time, we would expect to see the risk in the system go down, and that should translate into less serious accidents.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

In your various reviews and investigations you must come across some safety management systems that are best examples or models of best practices. Has that been the case? How would you suggest that we further build out this important pillar of rail safety in Canada?

[Kathy Fox]

We haven't done a cross-modal comparison or cross-company comparison of safety management systems. Certainly in each of our investigations we look at how companies are managing safety and we identify areas of risk.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Finally, if I understand correctly, the Transportation Safety Board has something called a watch list. Could you explain what that is, what's on it, and how that evolves?

[Wendy Tadros]

This is something we began a number of years ago to bring attention to the safety issues that we felt were most important. On the watch list right now are the nine most important safety issues in the transportation system.

Are you interested in the rail issues only, or in all of the issues?

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

The rail issues primarily.

[Wendy Tadros]

We have on-board video and voice recorders, following signal indications, and passenger trains colliding with vehicles in our high-speed train corridor. The first two of those issues are squarely coming out of our Burlington investigation, and they are both outstanding recommendations. As for the third, we see an awful lot of collisions in the high-speed corridor at rail crossings, and that's why that's on the list. These really are the issues where we verified and have done an awful lot of analysis to determine that they are the most important issues, and they're the issues that we really want to see action on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

We'll now move to Mr. Sullivan, for five minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

I want thank you for your excellent presentation at the very beginning because it gave us a very succinct analysis of where we are today.

I want to talk about risk analysis by the railroads themselves. In the U.S., rail carriers must analyze risk. Do they need to do the same thing in Canada, or is it only in the U.S. that they do that?

[Wendy Tadros]

This is part of a safety management system, so I'll let Madam Fox speak to that. She has a great deal of experience, particularly in the aviation industry, in terms of safety management systems, but the principles are the same.

[Kathy Fox]

I would just say that there's a need for ongoing risk analysis of ongoing day-to-day operations, and there's certainly a need when operations change. For example, changes in the carriage of dangerous goods should trigger an SMS-type risk analysis. Changes in routes, changes in going from primarily, say, transporting goods on the Prairies to transporting goods in the mountains, any type of operational or significant change should trigger a risk assessment.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Are you aware whether the railroads report these risk analyses to the government, or to Transport Canada, or to the Transportation Safety Board, or are they just left to their own devices?

[Wendy Tadros]

Transport Canada would audit the safety management system of railway companies because they're the regulator. The only way we would get involved in this is in an ongoing investigation. If we want to look at how the safety management system operated, then we would look at that in the context of that particular company and that accident.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

So you're not aware then whether or not any of the carriers in Canada have undertaken a new risk analysis based on the 400-fold increase in the transportation of diluted crude oil, for example.

[Wendy Tadros]

I'm not aware.