TORONTO – How safe are Canadian railroads? We don’t know.
A new report finds data around rail incidents in Canada is “worryingly inaccessible, sometimes conflicting and in certain cases not available at all.”
“The inability to publicly monitor airline safety statistics would be considered unacceptable,” said researcher Jennifer Winter. “Yet trains transporting volatile goods across Canada arguably expose entire communities, as in Lac-Mégantic, to potentially catastrophic dangers.”
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Serious questions about the safety of Canada’s rail-transport system were raised after a deadly train explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Que. last summer killed 47 people.
While federal and provincial governments have pledged to improve rail safety and the transportation of dangerous goods by train, any policy changes will need to be based on sound data that in many cases simply isn’t there, Winter said.
‘No shape to provide the answers to those questions’
Winter set out to answer two questions: How safe are Canadian railroads? How risky is it to transport goods by rail?
In a report published Tuesday by University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, Winter says the country’s public rail-safety information is “in no shape to provide the answers to those questions.”
“While basic statistics on the number of “accidents” and “incidents” aren’t hard to find, those two questions aren’t easy to answer,” she said.
Even statistics as basic as the number of train trips throughout the country don’t exist.
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If you wanted to know the probability of a given train experiencing an accident, “it would be impossible to determine using the currently available data. The Transportation Safety Board, Transport Canada and Statistics Canada do not publicly report the number of train trips in Canada.”
It’s not that the data doesn’t exist: Global News obtained a list of train accidents from the Transportation Safety Board from 2008 to 2012 through Access to Information laws. But this information is not publicly posted and is far from comprehensive: Accident locations are only provided to the nearest track milepost, which makes them difficult to understand, and it doesn’t tell you the train’s origin or destination. While this list doesn’t cover all the information that Winter believes should be public, it does indicate the government has detailed information on rail accidents – it just doesn’t make it easy for the public to get.
The report also says statistics from the Transportation Safety Board, Transport Canada and Statistics Canada don’t distinguish between incidents involving passenger trains and those involving freight trains. And the total number of accidents in some years is reported differently by these various monitoring organizations.
A November auditor-general’s report made 11 recommendations to Transport Canada related to oversight of rail safety after finding “significant weaknesses.” When Global News asked for a status report on each improvement back in January, Transport Canada said it’s “still working on implementing the recommendations made by the Auditor-General report.”
READ MORE: Transport Canada hasn’t implemented rail safety recommendations
Earlier this year, a government-commissioned rail safety working group said not enough has been done to ensure the safety of tank cars used to transport crude oil through Canadian communities.
‘It’s just as vital for the public to have that information’
Among a series of recommendations, the report calls on the federal government to develop a transportation data portal consolidating information on rail, road, pipeline, marine and air transportation and require Canada’s main rail companies to report detailed trip information to Transport Canada.
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It also suggests the government distinguish between freight and passenger trains in current accident and incident statistics and develop consistent standards of reporting railway occurrences.
“It is not only vital that our railroads are safe; it is just as vital for the public to have information showing exactly how safe they are,” the report reads.
FULL REPORT: Safety in numbers – Evaluating Canadian Rail Safety Data
– with files from Erika Tucker, and Leslie Young, Global News
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