Transport Committee on Sept. 11th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much to all of you.

Ms. Borges, to all of your officials, thank you so very much for coming today as we open this very interesting piece of legislation.

Thank you for all of the information you provided.

Individually, if any of the committee members have come up with some issues they need answers to, I would certainly encourage them to contact you directly as well so that everyone has the knowledge they require.

Thank you very much.

[Helena Borges]

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We will suspend until the next panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I will call the meeting back to order, if committee members could please take their seats.

Before we turn to our witnesses, we have a request for budget approval for this study. You all have a copy of it before you. Are there any questions?

Can I have a motion to adopt the budget proposal that's before you?

I have a motion by Mr. Fraser.

(Motion agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

Thank you all very much.

Turning to our witnesses, thank you very much to all of you for being here.

We now have the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board, a group that we would hope would never have anything to do, but unfortunately, in these last few years especially, you've had a lot on your plate. Thank you very much for being here.

Ms. Fox, would you like to introduce your colleagues? You have the floor.

[Kathleen Fox, Chair, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good afternoon and thank you very much, Madam Chair and honourable members, for inviting the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to appear today so that we can answer your questions regarding Bill C-49.

As you know, this bill introduces changes to the Railway Safety Act and to the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act, and these changes would require a mandatory installation of voice and video recorders in locomotive cabs operating on main track and would expand access to those recordings to Transport Canada and the railway companies under specified conditions. You may also know that these kinds of recordings have been in widespread use on board ships and aircraft for many years.

I bring with me today three colleagues who offer a wealth of experience.

Mr. Jean Laporte is our chief operating officer. He has been with the TSB since it was created and has extensive knowledge of our mandate and processes.

To my left, Mr. Mark Clitsome is a former director of investigations for the air branch and has been working closely with Transport Canada on the proposed legislative changes as well as those changes proposed to our own act.

On my far right, Mr. Kirby Jang is our director for rail and pipeline investigations and was heavily involved in the study on locomotive voice and video recorders that was released last year.

I'll keep my opening remarks brief today so that we can get to your questions quickly. In fact, there are just four key points I would like to make.

Number one is that at the TSB we need voice and video recorders in locomotive cabs to better conduct our investigations.

This is so critical that we have made two recommendations to this effect and put it on our Watchlist of key safety issues. Without locomotive voice and video recorders, or LVVRs, our investigators do not have access to all the information that they need to find out what happened—information that we need to help make Canada's rail network safer.

Let me give you an example.

On February 26, 2012, a VIA Rail passenger train derailed near Burlington, Ontario, killing the three crew in the cab and leaving dozens of passengers injured. The event recorder on board gave us some data, which is how we know that train was travelling 67 miles per hour on a crossover with a maximum speed of 15 miles per hour. What we were never able to determine with certainty was why. Did the crew not see the signals telling them to slow down, or did they see them but somehow misinterpret them? We just don't know, and we never will. An in-cab voice and video recorder would have provided a better understanding of the operational and human factors affecting that crew and would have helped point investigators toward safety deficiencies that could then have been mitigated.

This brings me to my second point. The information obtained from voice and video recorders must remain privileged. It must not be shared publicly. It must remain protected so that only those with the authority and the direct need to use it for legitimate safety purposes may do so.

Third, the information from selected voice and video recorders should be made available to railway companies for use in the context of a non-punitive, proactive safety management system.

Railway companies should be able to review the actions of their employees, for example, to see if track signals are always being called out, or if a train's limit of authority has been exceeded—actions that on their own might not directly cause an accident, but which could still indicate areas where safety can be improved.

This should not be for the purposes of discipline but rather to identify and correct systemic issues, which might lead to improvements in operating procedures or training. I stress, though, that this must happen in a non-punitive environment, which is why I make my last point. Notwithstanding the fact that we want railways to be given some access to these recordings, appropriate safeguards must be built into the legislation and the regulations to ensure that this information is not used for disciplinary purposes, except in the most egregious circumstances.

This final requirement may ultimately prove to be among the most challenging, in part because it relies on the existence of something called a “just culture”. This can be defined as an environment that draws a clear distinction between simple human mistakes and unacceptable behaviour, one that does not immediately blame the worker but seeks first to find systemic contributing factors.

Canadian railways, however, have often demonstrated a very rules-based punitive culture. While progress is being made to improve that culture, the TSB nonetheless understands employee concerns about the use and possible misuse of this kind of data.

Transport Canada should also have access to these recordings for safety oversight and should be able to use these recordings when taking action against an operator, but not against individual employees.

The proposed legislative changes are a departure from the way things have always been done, but as transportation evolves, so too must the way we do our work. There is little doubt that the information contained in voice and video recordings can be a valuable tool when used for legitimate safety purposes. The legislation and its implementation need to achieve the right balance between the rights of employees and the responsibility of operators to ensure the safety of their operations.

Thank you. We are prepared to answer any questions you may have.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Block.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you for joining us today. I appreciate the opportunity to hear from you and to also ask questions in regard to the legislation before us.

Ms. Fox, I thought I heard you say that there will also be information gathered from, I guess, selected different routes. Here's what I'm looking for. Does this mean there will be auditing happening? Let's say there hasn't been an incident, but during the course of a train trip from one point to another you perhaps would look at and audit different things through the LVVR to see what may have been happening. Will this be done randomly?

[Kathleen Fox]

That's correct. Under the draft legislation, there are a number of permitted uses beyond the uses by the Transportation Safety Board in the conduct of an investigation. In fact, we've provided you with a one-page fact sheet for ease of reference. It describes the permitted uses.

To answer your question specifically, if this legislation is approved, the railway companies would be allowed to randomly sample voice and video recordings as part of their overall analysis of safety data, as part of their safety management system. The specifics of that would likely be covered under the regulations, so one of the permitted uses would be random sampling under the SMS regulations to help them analyze and identify any concerns on safety.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Can you tell me what laws are currently in place to ensure that locomotive engineers don't spend time on their phones, say, or that they are following the rules of the company they are working for while operating a locomotive?

[Kathleen Fox]

There is the Railway Safety Act, the regulations that apply to railway companies, and a number of rules that have been developed by the industry and approved by Transport Canada. Each railway company has its own standard operating procedures as well.

At this time, the only way to monitor for things that people might be doing that they shouldn't be doing would be through the efficiency testing that the railways currently conduct, where they would have a supervisor-trainer ride with the crew. It is unlikely, during that time, the crew would be doing that type of behaviour. Other than that, unless there's some occurrence, there's really no other way to find out.

Part of the idea of having recorders, video and audio, aside from helping us with our investigations, is that it's a way for railway companies and Transport Canada, for different reasons, to see, for example, if the rules and procedures are being followed, but in a non-punitive sense. In other words, it wouldn't be for discipline, except if the sampling demonstrated an immediate threat to safety, which would be defined under the regulations.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

We heard from the department officials from Transport Canada that they had undertaken extensive consultations on everything that we see before us in Bill C-49. Was the Canadian Transportation Safety Board involved in those consultations on this specific issue?

As an observation, the main union representing train engineers has historically been opposed to LVVRs. Can you tell us what has been done to ease their concerns with this measure that is included in Bill C-49?

[Kathleen Fox]

I will give you a general answer, and then I will ask Mr. Kirby Jang to respond. The fact is that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada conducted a class-4 safety study into the implementation of voice and video recorders. That study involved a number of stakeholders, including Transport Canada, a number of railway companies, and Teamsters Canada Rail Conference representatives. We were very much involved in looking at the implementation issues, the legislative issues, and so on.

With respect to the teamsters' position, Mr. Jang, would you like to add to that?

[Kirby Jang, Director, Rail and Pipeline Investigations, Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board]

Certainly, we recognized that there was a diverse range of opinions in terms of what was appropriate use, when it came to the question of what was the appropriate use of LVVR recordings. As part of the safety study, we had a number of opportunities for very open discussions in terms of what those positions were. They were noted specifically within the safety study. We also explored the question of how these diverging views could be overcome, and there were some strategies identified in the safety study that addressed that question.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

I'm looking at the—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I am sorry, you are out of time.

Mr. Graham.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you for being here. Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Mayday has a deep appreciation for your work.

I have a number of questions about the LVVRs. What studies has TSB done on the LVVRs, and how do they compare with the CVR and FDR models in ships and planes? You mentioned ships and planes have these already. They don't use videos. How does that compare and why would we not do video the other way as well?

[Kathleen Fox]

In aviation, we have the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is the overarching organization to which Canada is a member, having signed the convention. On the maritime side, it is the International Maritime Organization.

Both of those set overarching standards for standards in aviation and marine. Both have required in Canada, in the case of air for over 50 years, and in the case of marine, since 2002, voice recordings. Video is not yet a requirement. It is something that is being discussed, currently, at the international level.

However, there have been recommendations, and in fact, the TSB has made recommendations with respect to the implementation of video recorders in air as a result of the Swiss Air accident back in 1998, and in rail as a result of the Burlington accident in 2013. In the case of rail, there is no overarching international organization, and that is why each country is left to its own to determine how to proceed in these cases.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

How does an LVVR work? Is it one camera looking forward from the front of the cab to the back of the cab, so you can see the crew? Is there one looking at the crew, one looking at the cab, one looking front, one looking back? What is the structure of an LVVR as you see it?

[Kathleen Fox]

I'm going to ask Mr. Jang to answer. Some of these technical aspects were looked at in the context of the LVVR study we completed last year.

[Kirby Jang]

In terms of LVVR, there is no standard in terms of configuration or set-up. As you mentioned, there are various views and fields of views that are obviously of interest. Within our study, we looked at four different configurations. It wasn't exhaustive, but they were experienced through Canadian railways, and even within those four installations the configurations were different.

Some of the things we look for include whether there's a view of the locomotive controls or perhaps a frontal view showing some of the interactions between the crew members. The study itself doesn't identify what is appropriate or what should be the case, but we tried to document some of the best practices.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I understand.

How much would it cost to put a unit into a locomotive?

[Kirby Jang]

From what I understand, it's about $20,000 per unit per locomotive.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Who uses LVVRs now around the world, and what kind of effect are we seeing from them? Do you have a sense of that?

[Kirby Jang]

In terms of the study, we didn't look at applications throughout the world. It was only the installations in the U.S. that we were able to determine had been put in place. There were no other installations that had advanced to the stage of actual use.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Okay.

You mentioned in your opening remarks, Ms. Fox, that this would be for equipment operating on main tracks. Which equipment is that? Is that locomotives, high rails, or everything running on the tracks? How do you envision that?