In both Canada and the United States, regulatory agencies have also experienced major budget cuts, layoffs and an exodus of trained personnel, eroding their ability to do independent evaluations of company practices. “The Department’s level of oversight was not sufficient to obtain assurance that federal railways have implemented adequate and effective safety management systems.” There were multiple critical evaluations of the system, including by the Auditor General of Canada, who concluded in a 2013 report:
This happened at a time of looming danger posed by the exponential increase in the transportation of oil by rail. With Canadian railways, the implementation of a safety oversight regime, called safety management systems or SMS, sealed the transition to company self-regulation. They were ignored or reprimanded for speaking out. In both cases, lower-level regulatory staff opposed regulatory outsourcing measures, warning against the fox guarding the henhouse. A revolving door of senior agency officials - moving from industry to regulator and back to lucrative industry lobbyist positions - aided and abetted the deregulation process. In both cases, regulatory agencies were captive to their regulated industries. Safety precautions were systematically eroded to the point where the likelihood of an accident became a game of Russian roulette: not if, but when. It was the worst industrial disaster on Canadian soil in a century.īoth disasters were the deadly consequence of a decades-long trajectory of deregulation in the aerospace and railway industries. In Lac-Mégantic, a runaway train laden with volatile Bakken shale oil from North Dakota crashed in the heart of the small Québec community, killing 47 people, orphaning 26 children, spilling an unprecedented six million litres of oil and incinerating the town centre.
There are some disturbing similarities between the Boeing Max 8 scandal and the July 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster. This news emerges despite the fact that crashes involving the plane - Lion Air in Indonesia in October 2018 and, five months later, Ethiopian Airlines in Addis Ababa - killed 346 people, including 18 Canadians. Canada has reportedly still allowed Boeing 737 Max 8s to fly, albeit without passengers, after they were grounded almost a year ago.
0 kommentar(er)
