Toronto Ontario - The recent derailment of a Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) freight train in central Toronto might have been prevented if the locomotive had an onboard camera tracking the crew's actions, the railway's chief operating officer said Tuesday.
 
The controversial proposal, which has been batted around for more than a decade, is strongly opposed by CP's union, which says onboard cameras would invade the privacy of employees if the company is allowed to view them.
 
Currently, in-cab recordings are only accessible to government investigators after an accident has occurred, but CP would like to see that changed.
 
"It's a very inexpensive technology and if the laws allowed it in Canada I would commit millions of dollars of this company's money to make quantum leaps in safety," Keith Creel, CP's president and chief operating officer, said in a luncheon speech at the Toronto Global Forum.
 
He referred specifically to an accident in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood last month that saw two CP trains collide, spilling hundreds of litres of fuel in a heavily populated area.
 
"After we run a locomotive into the side of a train not very far from here just a few weeks ago, I'm trying to figure out what happened, and if I had that camera in that locomotive I would know exactly what happened," said Creel, who has been tapped to succeed Hunter Harrison as the railway's CEO in July 2017.
 
CP has said there was no problem with the tracks or the signals and it appears the accident was the result of human error.
 
However, Creel said it's impossible to know what exactly happened without video footage of what the crew was doing at the time.
 
"The laws in Canada need to be changed specifically to allow us to equip locomotives with cameras so that we can see and understand exactly what crews are doing," he said.
 
"To suggest that you can do without the cameras is to suggest to me that we don't need the RCMP to make sure that we don't speed on the highways."
 
Creel emphasized that the video footage would not be used to punish crews or to invade their privacy, but the company's union begs to differ.
 
"If the employers had access to it, it would be used for all kinds of things," said Don Ashley, national legislative director for the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents some 5,000 CP employees.
 
"And not only that, I'm sure it would affect the performance of the crews operating the trains because there's that added stress of knowing that everything you say and do is being videotaped and recorded. It would create a more dangerous situation, in our view," he added.
 
The Transportation Safety Board has been advocating for locomotive voice recorders for more than a decade and renewed that call in 2012 after a VIA Rail passenger train derailed in Burlington killing three engineers and injuring 46 passengers.
 
The House of Commons' Standing Committee on Transport recommended in June that onboard recorders be mandated but access should be restricted to government investigators.
 
Kristine Owram.

OKthePK Joint Bar Editor:  There's nothing stopping CP from installing cameras right now except their expense. VIA already has cameras installed. The sticking point is CP's desire to have free access to the recordings at will. In-cab video recordings are currently only accessible by the Transportation Safety Board after an incident or accident as demanded by Federal law.