(The following story by Brent Jang appeared on the Globe and Mail website on April 25.)
MONCTON — Canadian National Railway Co.’s managers have stepped up their commitment to safety, and workers have to follow suit to help prevent costly derailments, says CN chief executive officer Hunter Harrison.
Mr. Harrison, who joined CN in 1998, said the railway needed to be whipped into shape in the years after the former federal Crown corporation became a publicly listed company in 1995 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
In the late 1990s, safety wasn’t taken as seriously within CN’s work force as it is now, but ever-more vigilant adherence by employees to train operating rules is crucial, said Mr. Harrison, who became CEO in 2002.
“Very frankly, we engaged to some degree, in certain areas, in a very permissive culture that did not require compliance with rules,” he said in an interview yesterday after CN’s annual meeting in Moncton. “When I suggested zero tolerance on the safety issue, people thought I was crazy.”
CN’s safety record came under fire from two B.C. mutual funds during the meeting, but 92.2 per cent of the ballots cast by shareholders voted against Ethical Funds Inc.’s proposal to “link executive compensation to environmental, social and governance success.”
In separate voting, 95.6 per cent of shareholders’ ballots rejected Inhance Canadian Equity Fund’s proposal to force CN to “conduct a track safety audit on policies, procedures and technical practices on the BC Rail line.”
Mr. Harrison said safety is already a top priority at Montreal-based CN. Yesterday, he named CN vice-president of transportation services Paul Miller as the railway’s new chief safety officer.
Jennifer Coulson, Ethical’s manager of sustainability, and Dermot Foley, Inhance’s vice-president of strategic analysis, welcomed the new appointment. They said they didn’t expect to score victories with their proposals, but were pleased to see their safety concerns make it onto the meeting’s agenda.
Ethical owns about 500,000 CN shares, while Inhance holds 12,000.
Mr. Harrison said CN’s corporate culture has changed for the better since 1998, when CN acquired Illinois Central Railroad Co., which he headed before jumping to CN.
“Have we made some mistakes? Yes,” he said. “Are we probably going to make a few more mistakes in the future? Yes. But are we bad, mean-spirited people who don’t care about safety? Absolutely not. Those are fighting words for me. We have never thought about compromising safety, thinking we could cut corners here or there.”
A large portion of derailments can be traced to human error, he said.
“If you go through any safety analysis or safety training, one of the things that you’ll learn is that 80 to 90 per cent of accidents are caused by human behaviour,” Mr. Harrison said, adding that too often, the focus is on weather conditions and other external factors, when it should be on the ability of workers to adapt to change.
United Transportation Union spokesman Frank Wilner said CN management needs to repair its relationship with workers. The 2,800-member UTU staged a 15-day strike in February, and went through another work stoppage earlier this month. “Mr. Harrison is ignoring that fatigue and, in some cases, insufficient training of new hires contribute significantly to what is the human factor in accidents,” Mr. Wilner said.