Thank you.

Good evening, I'm Joel Kennedy, Unifor's rail sector director, and I am here with my colleague, Mr. Graham Cox. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on Bill C-33.

Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, and represents 315,000 workers in every major area of the economy. Unifor represents 32 bargaining units and close to 10,000 members in the rail sector. This includes engineers, conductors, freight car and locomotive mechanics, electricians, crane operators, and a contingent of semi-skilled support workers, such as labourers and production workers who manufacture freight car, locomotive and track components. Unifor also represents 2,300 workers in the marine sector.

In the rail sector, Unifor members perform safety inspections on freight cars physically, visually, audibly, and sometimes even by smell. Our members perform brake tests and inspect the trains' mechanical components to ensure that they are working properly and are free of defects.

Current legislation requires these trains to be inspected and tested at the train's origin and destination points. However, regulatory exemptions have already been granted that allow rail companies to remove safety inspections and tests conducted by a qualified mechanic and to replace those with technology that is limited and largely untested and unregulated. We believe digital inspection creates some conflicts when the interests of the company's profits and that the inspection results do not align.

Unfortunately, technology and digitization is referred to in this bill in only the context of facilitating efficient supply chains and rule-making. Unifor believes this bill continues to and entrenches the “fox watching the henhouse” type of regulatory environment for the rail sector. We believe the large rail employers have taken advantage of this deregulated environment and are hiding behind safety to increase their bottom lines.

In an unregulated automation system there will be a lot of pressure for systems to be tweaked, not only for safety but also for convenience. Unifor believes that technology should be invested in and implemented to increase the safety and security of our supply chains. However, as it stands now, the focus has been on replacing workers while attempting to reach the same level of safety. There is even a current arbitration before the board about whether this digital safety inspection work is covered by Unifor's contract.

The U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe Center, based on its research on rail technology, has said that "Replacing workers should not be the focus of technology implementation. Instead technology should be used to augment work, not replace it, to increase the safety of the rail system." It is our understanding that this is also the position taken by the U.S. White House. We submit that any change to Canadian rail legislation that oversees safety should include the principle of augmentation in the pursuit of increased safety, not simply the replacement of workers in search of increased profits.

Unifor is also concerned that the proposed amendments by Bill C-33 to the ability to consult with third parties is just language to support the outsourcing responsibility to a third party on regulations and exemptions. If the minister's office feels it does not have in-house capacity to make good decisions on rules and exemptions, it should invest in a publicly financed, independent research arm to look at the impacts of rules and exemptions granted in the implementation of technology, not a private third party.

Unifor is concerned that private third party recommendations will be based on private proprietary data. Safety management systems and security management systems are already black boxes because they use software as if software development is some alien process and cannot be regulated. Unifor maintains that rule-making and the exemption process should be made public: Therefore, data collected on the impact of rules and exemptions should also be made public.

Finally, we'd also like to echo concerns brought up by our comrades at CUPE and ILWU about the implications of new powers of the minister when it comes to sustaining supply chains. While we recognize that the language was written to deal with pandemic-like emergencies, we feel that the language is too broad and, although it's not the intention of the language, could be used to interfere with the right to strike.

We believe the best model for expanded powers for emergency should be done, though, through a list of issues and types of disruption that can constitute emergencies and actions impacting supply chains. We submit that such a list can be clear to the public while also being sufficiently broad to deal with security against external actors, without undermining charter rights and legitimate actions.

I would like to also say that our friends at Teamsters adopt our positions as well, and they couldn't make it here today for certain reasons.

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