Rail travel still safe

There is a long list of legitimate complaints the Opposition can lay at the door of the federal Conservatives these days. A perceived crisis in rail safety is not one of them.

“How many more tragedies does it take for the Harper government to take action?” asked NDP MP Olivia Chow in a statement this week. She was referring to the recent train crash in Burlington, a sad accident that killed three people and injured dozens more. From her remarks, an observer might be forgiven for thinking this happens in Canada all the time.

Chow is absolutely right to raise questions about whether mandated technology, such as voice recorders or Positive Train Control, might save lives. The context missing from Chow’s critique is that tragedies on Canadian trains are relatively few even without that. Surely not every policy question has to be portrayed as a crisis.

Indeed, the fact that the deaths of three people in a train derailment were big news in Canada says a lot about Canada, and specifically about rail travel here. Over the last decade, fatalities from rail accidents in Canada have averaged 88 per year. Most of those were crossing and trespasser accidents.

Derailments are not usually responsible for more than a few deaths a year, or in some years, not any.

This is not to suggest that Canada should not hold itself to a high safety standard and work to improve its record. But if we’re going to discuss safety, we have to put it in perspective. In Canada, any fatal derailment is national news for days whereas a car accident that killed the same number of people would hardly be news at all. It is important to find out whether this accident could have been prevented, and those lives saved. It is important to reduce the number of minor accidents that interfere with the movement of goods and people every week on Canada’s railroads.

But all things considered, safety is not the biggest issue threatening the relevance of rail to Canada’s transportation infrastructure.