Profits win over safety

Editor: It used to be that nasty civic accidents that killed some people and maimed many — like the recent bus/ train crash in Ottawa and the LacMegantic train explosion — happened only in far away places with weak governments and a failure of civil society.

How has this sort of event come to hit so close to home just this year?

It’s easy to shrug them off as unfortunate accidents, but I think something deeper is happening here. In the case of Lac- Megantic it has been shown that only one operator was in charge of a large, heavy load of materials that were far more dangerous than anyone expected or reported. Put simply — a case of shareholder value trumping public safety.

I wonder what the underlying reason is in the Ottawa disaster. We have heard from members of the engineers’ union that busses routinely race trains to that crossing. One wonders whether ( for profit reasons) the bus drivers are expected to keep to unsustainable tight schedules, forcing them to take unacceptable risks. This has happened before. Or maybe it was lack of appropriate training or even a driver who was overworked or should have been on sick leave, which he could not take because he could not afford it. All pure speculation, which I admit may be better to leave to the Transportation Safety Board or whichever body investigates this accident.

What remains is an uncomfortable feeling that this is not the Canada I knew and loved. Profit and shareholder value are taking precedence over the public good and our government is allowing — nay encouraging — it to happen. It has been proven over and over that the Marketplace is not a good protector of public safety or, in fact, of any of the civic values we hold dear. We must, for the sake of our own and others’ safety, return to a regime where the government has the power and the resources to strictly regulate these for- profit service providers or even to return to directly providing essential services, thereby eliminating the profit motive. Jane Dunphy, Annandale