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.