Public Safety committee  That's fine. Thank you, Mr. Chair. To add to that, the protocol calls for an immediate and mandatory three days off for locomotive engineers following any critical incident, with a strong suggestion of meeting a counsellor prior to returning home from work. We also provide emplo

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for giving us the opportunity to speak to this committee. At VIA Rail, mental health is paramount to the overall health and safety of employees, and we take it very seriously. VIA Rail has adopted the national standard for psychological health and

Transport committee  The union has participated with us from the conception of that project. They are thrilled about that project. We have only tried it as a prototype in November between Montreal and Ottawa. They have even participated in the design of the screens. Our strong safety culture and rel

Transport committee  Yes, we have metrics at VIA Rail, and we monitor them very closely. The metric is total incidents per million miles for main line incidents.

Transport committee  Anything that would support connectivity in this country and take cars off the road we would certainly support. A good example of that would be our dedicated high-frequency rail plan.

Transport committee  Fatigue was not recognized as a factor. It was a missed signal that the crew interpreted differently, or during the station stop they did not recall what the previous advance signal would have been, so they were not expecting to take a turn when they did. There was no mention of

Transport committee  We haven't installed any cameras so far. Only voice recordings are made, and we've informed workers of that. The union representative is involved in the project we are working on with the Transportation Safety Board. We are trying to figure out how we are going to proceed. Some

Transport committee  I think locomotive voice and video recorders would bring a very important element to being able to manage safety. The current laws and regulations in place, and the current pilot project being led by the Transportation Safety Board, will take us to a different level. With that pi

Transport committee  To my knowledge, we examined one accident that may have been tied to fatigue. It involved train No. 15, in Saint-Charles-de-Bellechasse, Quebec. That's the only accident for which fatigue was cited as a contributing factor.

Transport committee  The accident occurred in 2010.

Transport committee  Well, from VIA Rail's perspective, our fatigue management plan is very rigorous and followed to the letter, without ever being comprised. As I said, we present our fatigue management plans to the unions. We work on them together. We mutually agree to them and we implement them.

Transport committee  We identified some monies in our 2016 budget to address our security strategy. We've been implementing it since the first quarter of this year, so we do have a strategy. The government recently announced some additional funding for our security strategy, so we're very happy to he

Transport committee  Thank you for your question. Right now, we are taking part in an in-cabin video and voice recorder project, in partnership with the Transportation Safety Board. Our locomotives are already equipped with event recorders that can be checked remotely, by computer, to ascertain the

Transport committee  I'm talking about two different things. First, there is the video and voice recording system. Second, there is an event recorder, which has been in place since the 1980s and can be used to obtain reference data and information on the train's behaviour at any time. The information

Transport committee  Yes. They are all equipped with event recorders that provide us with all relevant data on the train's operation, such as speed and braking information. They also tell us things like whether the lights were on and whether the horn was sounded as the train approached a level crossi