Transport Committee on Feb. 10th, 2022

[Kathleen Fox]

[Technical difficulty—Editor] not aware of any current blockades at rail lines, but again, that would be for the government, for the railway companies or for the regulator to address. We investigate accidents and incidents, not those types of events.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

I'll move on to the next part. I guess it goes back to railway crossings. I was the mayor of a town for a lot of years, and I definitely saw the risks involved with a lot of those crossings. You said earlier that—I can't quite remember how many—people were in accidents. In particular, perhaps some people mistakenly.... I know of people in my community who happened to be driving, and the radio was on too loud, or whatever it possibly could be.... They could be tired, fatigued, but there are a lot of other ones where you find out later that perhaps they had mental stress or something of that nature in their lives.

I'm wondering if you could elaborate. Do you get numbers from that at all? Is there any follow-up on what we could do to perhaps make these safer?

[Kathleen Fox]

Well, we do have statistics on railway crossing accidents. We have done a number of railway crossing investigations through the years. We are doing one now.

A major improvement was the grade crossing regulations and grade crossing standards that Transport Canada implemented in 2014, but there are a number of issues when it comes to crossings. It's the design of the crossing. It's maintaining the crossing. It's maintaining the sight lines of the crossing. It is, as was mentioned earlier, not blocking crossings for protracted periods of time beyond five minutes, which is what the regulations say is the maximum. It is also driver and pedestrian behaviour.

We're going to be looking at a number of those issues in an ongoing investigation we're doing into a crossing accident in Ontario.

[Terry Dowdall, Conservative, Simcoe—Grey, ON]

Okay, but you don't exactly get a breakdown of perhaps the state of the individual, I guess, and why it happened. I'm just wondering whether we are doing enough, for instance, for a lot of the people who are using railways. Because of the frustration in their lives, should we be sending a message that we need to do more for mental health?

[Kathleen Fox]

Certainly, if you look at some of the trespassing occurrences—and I don't have good statistics on how many of those trespassing accidents were intentional versus accidental, if I may say—we do look at driver behaviour when we investigate crossing accidents. We don't do a lot of trespassing accidents, but we have done some. We do look at driver behaviour with respect to crossing accidents to the extent that we can, recognizing that there may be no camera and there may be no survivor, etc.

Certainly, driver behaviour is something we're going to look at in the context of the crossing study we're doing now for the increase in crossing accidents during the winter months.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Dowdall.

Mr. Iacono, the floor is yours, and you have five minutes.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Mrs. Fox and Monsieur Lapointe, welcome to the committee. It's nice to see you again.

Mrs. Fox, in November 2020, Transport Canada approved the new duty and rest rules for railway operating employees. You've made reference in the past to the statistic that the number of casualties has gone down. Did these new rules better align with the latest science on fatigue management? Did it represent a significant improvement over the old rules?

[Kathleen Fox]

I'm not in a position to compare the new and the old, but we will certainly look at it in the context of our investigations. Because those new duty rules came into effect in November 2020, it takes a while before we see the impact of that in the system, but we certainly look at fatigue as a possible causal or contributing risk factor in any rail investigation that we do, or any other mode, for that matter.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you.

How can Transport Canada improve the advice it gives to railway companies about how to collect and communicate their data on rail safety?

[Kathleen Fox]

That's a big question.

Railway companies are obviously required to send certain data to Transport Canada. We suggested in a previous recommendation that broadening the types of data sent to Transport Canada could improve monitoring of railway companies. For example, it is not enough to look only at breakages. Early warning signs of incidents and accidents also need to be identified.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you.

What role should municipalities and community associations play in improving rail safety in Canada?

[Kathleen Fox]

Municipalities and organizations like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities certainly have a role to play in the safety of grade crossings, not only in terms of maintenance, but also the development of subdivisions and community development.

For example, if we want to build a grade crossing in a very busy area, we have to ask if it wouldn't be worthwhile to instead build an underpass or an overpass to avoid the risk of collision. However, this type of construction is still relatively costly.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

I fully agree.

What are the best land use planning practices that enhance railway access and promote residential and commercial development and a safer community environment?

[Kathleen Fox]

I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, that goes a little beyond my expertise, or at least my ability to come up with a good answer today.

I've attended some Federation of Canadian Municipalities meetings where this has been a big topic of discussion. It's a shared responsibility between the municipalities and the railway operators under the overall guidance of Transport Canada, which sets the standards and the rules.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Ms. Fox, I have some factual questions. First, is the RCMP investigating the Field, B.C. tragedy? Second, do you have any general comments about railway policing in Canada? Is it appropriate that there is specialized railway policing, or should everything be delegated to the RCMP or the local police force?

[Kathleen Fox]

To answer the first question, it is my understanding that the RCMP is conducting a criminal investigation into the Field occurrence, which is completely separate and independent from the TSB safety investigation into the same occurrence.

I have no opinion to express on the role of railway police versus federal or provincial police forces.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Fox.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Iacono.

Thank you, colleagues.

My sincere thanks to our witnesses, Ms. Fox and Mr. Lapointe. You can now disconnect and leave the meeting.

Colleagues, I'll ask that you stay behind while I suspend the meeting temporarily, so we can let in our next round of witnesses.

Thank you, everyone.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

This meeting is now back in session.

I'd like to thank the second round of witnesses for their presence today.

Appearing before us we have Mr. Gian-Carlo Carra, city councillor for the City of Calgary; Mr. Chris Apps, the director of Kitselas lands and resources for the Kitselas First Nation; and Mr. Lyndon Isaak, president of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.

Witnesses, welcome to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. We will now begin with your opening remarks.

I will turn the floor over to you, Mr. Carra. You have five minutes.

[Gian-Carlo Carra, City Councillor, City of Calgary]

Thank you.

This is going to be a bit different from the first section. I hope it provokes some interesting conversation.

My position is that the railroad, and particularly the Canadian Pacific Railroad, was a P3 project that physically built the nation of Canada. Today we require significantly lower-carbon approaches to almost every component of modern life if we are to survive and thrive as a continentally scaled project of civilization in an age of increasing climate instability. Like the bicycle, the railroad is an old-school transportation technology that must play a renewed role in this future. Put another way, the railroad must be as important to Canada 100 years from now as it was 100 years ago.

Safety is a key consideration of how to better fit this old technology into modern life at a moment of significant and contested change in what modern life actually means. If we fail to understand the change proposition that's before us, it's very likely we will get the question of safety wrong.

Our experience at the City of Calgary offers a great case study in what this means, particularly as we work to reconcile today's approaches to rail safety with the lower-carbon, transit-oriented city building of tomorrow that we need.

The same way the railroad established Canada as a series of settlements at station areas networked along the route with vast swaths of farmland and wilderness in between, our original approach to building our larger settlements followed the same pattern at a smaller scale. Streetcar networks linked neighbourhood centres to each other and to industrial working landscapes. Across Canada today, these streetcar-developed downtowns, so-called streetcar suburbs, and industrial landscapes represent some of the most productive, valuable, desirable and low-carbon parts of our cities and towns.

The city of Calgary is extremely representative of this phenomenon. Eighty-five per cent of our city has been built since the end of World War II, in conjunction with the rise of the automobile and the decline of the railroad. The 15% representing the earlier transit-oriented city built by the streetcar significantly outperforms the automobile-scaled city across the social, environmental, public health, economic and fiscal spectrums. Therefore, our approach to the future is to retrofit our automobile-scaled city into a transit-oriented city of great neighbourhoods, driven by federally supported projects like the Green Line.

Challengingly, as we began planning for the Green Line over five years ago, with community-involved, station-area, city-shaping planning exercises—and due to the Green Line's proximity to and in some cases use of active heavy rail right-of-ways—we ran amok of rail safety policies. This conflict was significantly more sensitive due to the recency of the Lac-Mégantic disaster. On the one hand, we were looking at a safety best practice of a 30-metre setback from these corridors. That's a 200-foot-wide corridor along much of the line. On the other hand, we had a lower-carbon future of mixed-use transit-served neighbourhoods that desperately needed this valuable real estate to build this future.

We had a very big conversation about safety and risk. When we ran the actual numbers, it became clear that our default setting, which would be protecting our population from high-impact but very low-frequency event disasters, like Lac-Mégantic, was actually much less safe an outcome, as we were therefore subjecting our population to a very high frequency of lower-impact events, ranging from the propinquity of automobile accidents to the long-term effects of sedentary lifestyles and a significantly higher contribution to climate change.

Our solution was to build a very thoughtful safety and risk profile all along the line, armouring against derailments where derailments might actually occur and limiting access but protecting access for emergency response and repairs. The 200 feet of dead zone shrank considerably, into a much safer and more usable corridor. Speed limits according to the environment and risk profile were also critical to these considerations.

The city of the automobile, which is the city of climate change, is predicated on a discrete segregation of uses and components of the city. A transit-oriented city, which is the city of climate action, requires a robust and thoughtful mix of uses. “The age of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad”, as James Howard Kunstler puts it, must end. Canadians need to eat food that's produced much closer to home. We must use goods that are produced much closer to home. The railroad must play a much more integrated role in our cities and towns moving forward, much like it used to, but with much more sensitivity than we exercised in the past. This requires a better understanding of risk and an evolved understanding of safety.

As a final note, dangerous goods transport and conflict between trains and other users are obviously key components of safety, but air quality is also critical. Hydrogen and/or electrification offer longer-term solutions, but diesel blends that reduce total fuel consumption and complex hydrocarbon emissions are a critical short-term path that we must explore as well.

Thank you. I'm happy to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Carra.

Next we will go to Mr. Apps.

Mr. Apps, the floor is yours. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Chris J. Apps, Director, Kitselas Lands and Resources Department, Kitselas First Nation]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in light of its study on railway safety today.

I'm here today representing Kitselas First Nation, with whom I have worked for five years in the capacity of director of lands and resources. Kitselas Nation is located in the northwest of B.C. Amidst a territory of 1.8 million hectares that stretches 200 kilometres along the Skeena River and out to the Pacific north coast, there are seven reserves with two primary communities. These communities are located near Terrace, British Columbia.

Kitselas has had a long, troublesome history with the railroad. In many ways, the rail serves as a modern embodiment of colonialism to the people of the canyon, known as the Gitselasu, who were once the toll-keepers of the Skeena River. After having cut through their lands, the infrastructure that alienated Kitselas from their economy remains to this day, bifurcating reserves, communities and the territory. Today, Kitselas is impacted further by Canada's largest infrastructure projects, including the LNG Canada export facility and the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Over 25 industrial projects affect the territory and subsequently our community members.

In 2019, as a result of concerns heard from our leadership and the community, we commissioned Dr. Janis Shandro, a community health and safety specialist with a global portfolio, to assess the health and safety risks associated with this unprecedented level of industry. In her technical report to our nation, she identified the need to better understand community health and safety risks associated with rail. At the time of her assessment, rail traffic was reported by local emergency services professionals to be growing considerably. Her direct observation while undertaking this work indicated that as many as three trains per hour can pass through our communities. Based on proposed industrial projects in the region, the observed growth in traffic will only increase, with the primary cargo being dangerous goods.

Industrial development in the region has had other side effects as well. Through Kitselas' participation in quarterly round tables for LNG Canada, it has been consistently noted with evidence that the capacity of the emergency services in the Terrace and Kitimat area is insufficient to meet the current needs. The implication of this fact in the event of a rail disaster is significant. We have lobbied across all facets of provincial government for improvements in this essential service area to no avail.

Based on recommendations from Dr. Shandro's 2019 report, Kitselas commissioned another investigation, again pulling on global expertise. In this case, we commissioned Dr. Franco Oboni and his team at Riskope, a leading risk assessment consulting firm, who have assessed rail-related and other risk hazards for clients around the world. His scope was to undertake an independent rail and road transportation risk assessment.

The objective of this investigation was to determine, using available information and data, if there were indeed risks to human populations that should be of concern. The scope of the investigation included three segments of track from the northern border of Kitselas territory through to Prince Rupert and Kitimat; two corresponding segments of highway, Highway 16 and Highway 37; and the local road network within one kilometre maximum of the rail line. The investigation also looked into potential interactions between rail and road traffic, as it was identified that there are significant stretches of infrastructure alignment in which the rail line is adjacent to Highway 16. The proximity of highways and railroad will likely generate further aggravation.

The study concluded that harm to people is already on the verge of international societal risk acceptability thresholds if both railroad and highway accidents are considered. This finding was made with publicly available information only. Riskope's study identified that, depending on the traffic structure, accidents and mortality rates could increase significantly. I will repeat that, at this time, based only on the information we could obtain, we were at the brink of acceptable risk thresholds. More projects are coming. These facts should foster enhanced attention, preventative mitigative measures and safety programs all along the highway and the rail line.

The study undertaken by Kitselas provides several recommendations, which we have prepared in a supplemental brief for this committee. The recommendations are not complex, actually; they're very practical. It's plain to see that they're needed to safeguard our communities.

In conclusion, I want to highlight how important health and safety is to Kitselas. We've independently been commissioning these investigations at the nation's own cost, as our federal and provincial regulatory bodies have failed to do so. I sincerely hope my testimony today does more than just provide another record of where Kitselas has formally registered concern over rail safety. We need to address these recommendations from global risk professionals, and we need to do so now. People's lives depend on it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Apps.

Mr. Isaak, welcome to the committee. The floor is yours. You have five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Lyndon Isaak, President, Teamsters Canada Rail Conference]

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

I'm Lyndon Isaak, and I'm the president of Teamsters Canada Rail Conference. Teamsters Canada Rail Conference represents 10,000 transportation employees in Canada from coast to coast. This includes locomotive engineers, conductors, yard persons and rail traffic controllers from CN, CP, VIA Rail and multiple short-line railroads.

To give you a little of my background, I was hired on with CN Rail as a brakeman in 1987. I qualified as a conductor in 1989 and as a locomotive engineer in 1992. I worked as a locomotive engineer until January 2019, when I was elected into my current position.

February 4 of this year marked the three-year anniversary of the CP Field Hill tragedy. A runaway train descended uncontrolled down a mountain grade in British Columbia, resulting in the death of three of our members. After initially allowing CP's police force to investigate the accident, as mandated by the Railway Safety Act, almost two years following this tragedy public pressure compelled the RCMP to conduct a criminal investigation.

It is crucial that we amend section 44 of the Railway Safety Act. This section of the act grants exclusive jurisdiction to corporate private police forces on railroad property and within 500 metres of “property that the railway company owns, possesses or administers”. The scope and jurisdiction of corporate and/or private police forces must exclude investigations involving accidents and/or fatalities. These types of situations should be investigated through the TSB, Transport Canada and/or the RCMP.

As additional information on the Field Hill accident, the TSB has not released a final report to date, three years after the incident.

The second subject of concern I'd like to address today—you were touching on it briefly when I came on this Zoom—is the issue of fatigue in the rail industry. In December 2018 the Minister of Transport issued a ministerial order to tell rail companies to amend the railway work/rest rules. After the first submission was rejected, the second set of work/rest rules proposed by the Railway Association of Canada on behalf of the rail carriers was accepted by Transport Canada and released by Minister Garneau in November 2020. To date, we are working with Transport Canada to clarify the application and intent of some of the language contained in this document.

Our concern now lies in the fatigue management plans, which were to be completed by the end of 2021. We have recommended that Transport Canada reject the draft fatigue management plan submitted by both CN and CP as insufficient. We contend that the fatigue management plans must address the stipulations contained in the ministerial order that are absent in the work/rest rules—specifically, the impact of deadheading on the maximum duty period and advance notice for work schedules to employees.

Another item that woefully needs to be addressed is the away-from-home rest facilities utilized by the railroads. Currently, some locations contain trailers or structures as rest facilities that are up to 60 years old and woefully insufficient for meaningful rest. Many rest facilities currently in use are built on railroad property, in close proximity to rail yards or our main lines, resulting in excessive noise and vibration issues within the facility. I believe the rest facilities should be governed by separate standards legislated by the federal government. Employees cannot be blamed for insufficient rest and fatigue when there is no real opportunity for meaningful rest.

I thank you for the opportunity to bring some of our concerns forward today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Isaak.

We'll now go forward with the first round of questioning.

Mr. Muys, the floor is yours.