Thank you.
Good morning.
A part of the basic principles of our safety management system is that it has helped us to develop and maintain a very good, strong safety culture. All of our employees contribute to our safety management system. Both the unionized and the management levels are fully involved.
It clearly identifies responsibilities and accountabilities for all safety leaders so that we know who does what and who is accountable. It promotes the safety, security, and health of all of our employees, our passengers, and the general public. It helps us to comply with all applicable laws and regulations and even to exceed those.
Also, it provides us a framework for setting goals and targets and for planning and measuring our safety performance.
We have a structure that is headed off with corporate policies and SMS standards at an overview level. Then it works down into an annual corporate safety plan that is communicated throughout the organization. There are regional department plans so that everybody knows what their piece is and how they contribute to the overall success. Then we produce checklists and job aids and such to make it easy on a day-to-day basis. We clearly identify what those expectations are, and then we implement through various initiatives and programs. Then the cycle continues and feeds back up and down and around again.
How do we monitor the performance? We do this daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly on an annual basis through the reviews of various reports and safety performance items to look for trends so that we can conduct risk assessments and prevent any risks that surface.
How does this lead specifically to our safety culture? One of the first things is that we had our SMS, our safety management system, in place at VIA Rail a year before it became a regulatory requirement. We saw the value in having such a system in place, and we worked closely with our regulatory partners, who helped us develop and implement our safety management system.
It's a differentiator for us in our culture. It's quite evident in the leadership that is displayed from our president and CEO in chairing safety meetings on a monthly basis. With front-line investment priorities, we've invested a significant amount of moneys to improve our infrastructure, our equipment, and our various systems, and in technology to help us improve. The continuous focus on risk management and performance management, and on the partnerships that we have with our union partners, the communities, and the regulators, is a joint effort, and we appreciate very much all the support we've received.
If you'll permit me to, I'll share two excerpts about our safety culture from outside sources. The first one was from a statement during the Railway Safety Act review:
Among major rail companies, VIA Rail has a respected SMS system and entrenched safety culture....the Panel also noted that VIA takes safety management seriously by making it important to everyone in the company.
We discuss this daily. An extract from a third-party auditor that we had come in and audit the resiliency of our safety management system observed that a safety culture is well embedded throughout the organization. This isn't an easy thing to do, so we feel that our efforts have been well worth it.
I'll invite my colleague Denis to add more specifics on some of our safety initiatives that have helped.