Hunter Harrison, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. chief executive - Date unknown Chris Young.

22 May 2013

"Get ready to deal with fear":  CP Rail Chief Harrison Fires Back at Union Critics Over Safety Concerns

New York New York USA - Hunter Harrison, Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. chief executive, fired back at some of the railway's union leaders Wednesday after they expressed concerns this week that a restructuring underway at the railway may be contributing to several high-profile derailments, including one in Saskatchewan on Tuesday that spilled more than 68,500 litres of crude oil on the ground before it was contained.
 
"Our culture as I see it is about accountability and consequences. People got a job to do, and if they do it well, they're going to be rewarded. That's part of the consequences," Mr. Harrison said at a conference in New York Wednesday.
 
"If they don't follow the rules and instructions, and don't do what they're supposed to do, they ain't gonna like the consequences," he added. "Now if that's a culture of fear, they better get ready to deal with fear."
 
Mr. Harrison did, however, acknowledge that some of CP's secondary branch lines needed to be upgraded to accommodate the heavier crude and potash trains that are now running on them. He said some of additional $100-million dedicated to its $1.1-billion capital expenditure program this year would go toward that goal.
 
"We're operating up there with 100-pound, jointed rail, 1950s vintage," he said.
 
"We've gotten all that we can get out of there. These incidents have been the result of some internal flaws in the rail and so we're having to go through some additional screening and testing and patrolling that we wouldn't have had to otherwise," he added.
 
He suggested that derailments had caught the attention they have because three of them involved crude oil, which has been used as political capital in the fight to build more pipeline capacity, including the Keystone XL pipeline.
 
CP is still determining the cause of the derailment earlier this week outside of Wynyard, Saskatchewan. But that derailment followed another two-train collision in one of its yards near Medicine Hat, Alberta, on Saturday.
 
Those accidents followed another two crude train derailments and a potash train derailment in recent months that were blamed on two shattered wheels and an internal flaw in one of CP's tracks.
 
Two of CP's union leaders told the Financial Post this week they were concerned that Mr. Harrison's restructuring measures at the railway, including nearly 4,000 job losses, were forming the basis of the same sort of "culture of fear" the federal government chastised Mr. Harrison for creating at rival Canadian National Railway Co. in 2008 after a review of the safety records of the country's largest railways.
 
That safety review, which was launched in part in response to several high-profile derailments at CN, said Mr. Harrison had created a culture at CN wherein mistakes were punished but solutions were seldom implemented to prevent them from reoccurring.
 
Tom Murphy, CAW Local 101 president, which represents 1,900 skilled trades workers at CP, told the Financial Post this week that car mechanics, who are responsible for inspecting the rail cars for safety, were being stretched too thin and disciplined if they took too long to inspect CP's trains in the yard.
 
He said there are now often two inspectors per train as opposed to four, and in some cases, trains are leaving the yards with only clerks, not trained inspectors, looking for defects as the trains pass by on their way out of the yard rather than the closer inspections that are usually performed.
 
If inspectors take too long, they are suspended or fired, Mr. Murphy said.
 
Asked if he thought this was the same culture of fear Mr. Harrison implemented at CN, Mr. Murphy said:  "100 percent."
 
But Rob Johnston, manager of the Transportation Safety Board central region operations, said his agency deals with more than 1,200 rail incidents a year, and at this point, he doesn't see any correlation between the recent derailments at CP.
 
"Historically, you kind of see things go in cycles. Sometimes one railway will have some troubles, and then it switches," he said. "There's nothing that I've seen here that is terribly unexpected, or uncharacteristic, or could be linked to any particular type of thing."
 
Scott Deveau.

Vancouver Island
British Columbia
Canada