Cameras on trains will violate staff rights: union
Safety trumps privacy concerns, transport minister says of proposal
The union representing rail workers says new legislation that would require cameras to be installed on Canada’s trains threatens workers’ privacy and came as a surprise.
But Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Wednesday he’s spoken with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference about the proposal, and the union knew what was being planned.
“Safety has to predominate here,” Garneau said in an interview.
The law would require railway companies to equip locomotives with voice and video recorders that could be used by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada after an accident to assess what went wrong. It’s part of a larger package of changes Garneau tabled in the House of Commons Tuesday to modernize transportation laws.
The safety board has been calling for on-board recorders for years.
But the union is upset that railway companies would also have access to the recordings to conduct random samples and look for safety risks.
“From the workers’ perspective, the government has abandoned them,” union president Doug Finnson said. “I’m particularly pissed at this.”
Garneau insisted the government will protect workers’ privacy by limiting how companies can use the recordings. “There will be very defined times when these can be used and it’s in order to improve safety,” he said.
But Finnson claims that once railway companies have access to the recordings, the government won’t be able to control how they use them.
“Transport Canada can’t enforce the regulations they have right now,” he said. “I have absolutely no confidence in the employer adhering to any kinds of rules and regulations about access.”
It’s still unclear how much power companies will have to act on what they see and hear in the recordings.
Jean Laporte, chief operating officer of the Transportation Safety Board, said if railway companies observe employees engaged in criminal activity or gross negligence, they will have a “moral obligation … to take action and deal with that.”
According to the proposed legislation, companies can use the recordings “to address a prescribed threat to the safety of railway operations.”
Laporte said the definition of a safety threat, and the actions companies can take, will be set out in regulations still to come. “Where we draw the line is yet to be determined.”
Finnson also claims the new legislation caught the union offguard. He said the Teamsters were told during a recent meeting with government officials that the law would be tabled by the end of the year, but he didn’t realize it would come so soon.
“I didn’t understand that to mean that it was already prepared and on the minister’s table,” he said. “We’ve been lied to.”
But Laporte said the union participated in a safety study on the use of voice and video recorders released last fall, and has been invited to various meetings on the issue where it made its concerns known.
This is a matter of balancing public safety and workers’ rights, Laporte said. He pointed out that voice recorders have been used on planes and ships for years.
Still, those recorders don’t collect video. Laporte said the difference is that Canadian planes and ships travel internationally, unlike trains. If a plane crashed in another country, he said, Canada would have no control over how the foreign government used the video.
“It’s a little bit more complex, but it doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in the future.”
Canadian Pacific Railway didn’t respond to a request for comment about the union’s privacy concerns. But the company commended Garneau for the new legislation in a news release Tuesday.
“Having the ability to use this technology in a proactive manner will allow us to prevent incidents and improve rail safety,” CEO Keith Creel said in the release.
Transport Canada can’t enforce the regulations they have right now. I have absolutely no confidence in the employer adhering to any kinds of rules and regulations about access.