As a growing number of train derailments raise public safety concerns, documents that contain a rail company’s safety plan — and play a key role in the regulation of the rail industry — are “locked up in a vault,” say some industry experts and safety advocates.

Amid calls for increased transparency about rail companies and the products they carry, company-specific safety regimes — which detail practices, policies, employee training and more — are not available through Transport Canada.

Although the federal regulator audits the safety plans, known as safety management systems (SMS), for compliance, a spokesperson said they’re “third-party information” and should be accessed through the companies.

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“You should contact them directly for more information,” Transport Canada said.

But some rail carriers, including Canada’s two largest, say the plans are confidential.

The secrecy, according to some industry and safety experts, leaves the public unable to scrutinize the practices of rail companies or hold them accountable to commitments.

“If the public doesn’t have access to these documents, there’s no backstopping,” said Mark Winfield, an associate professor at York University who researches public safety regulation.

In 2001, changes to the Railway Safety Act required federally regulated rail companies to develop a safety management system, officially defined as “a formal framework for integrating safety into day-to-day railway operations.” It must include risk assessments, rules and procedures, safety goals and more.

The system sees companies develop their own safety protocol that Transport Canada audits for compliance, as opposed to a set of regulations that apply to all companies. Carriers must still comply with overarching regulations outlined in the Railway Safety Act.

Also in place in the aviation and other industries, the SMS program has been criticized by some as deregulation. Critics say it offloads the government’s responsibility to regulate onto the industry, and encourages paper inspections by Transport Canada officials in Ottawa as opposed to safety checks in the field.

Transport Canada maintains it does “detailed inspections of infrastructure, equipment and operations,” according to its website.

E. Wayne Benedict, a long-time rail employee who is now a Calgary-based labour lawyer, says that given the important role a company’s safety management system plays in regulation, its contents should be public. But allowing the company to create its own rules also means those rules belong to the company.

“They’ve opened up the prospect where this private corporation can claim proprietary interest over the safety management process,” Benedict said.

Safety management plans could be requested through Access to Information legislation, but provisions protecting trade secrets and commercial legislation means much of the information contained within could be withheld.

Long wait times that might occur if the company fights the release of their SMS in court could mean any information eventually released may be obsolete, since safety plans are regularly revised.

Retired Justice Virgil Moshansky believes there’s “a penchant for secrecy” concerning transport regulation documents. A member of the Order of Canada for his work on aviation safety, Moshansky led the public inquiry into the Dryden disaster, a 1989 plane crash that killed 21 people, and claims he had difficulty obtaining key regulatory documents he needed.

“Not disclosing (a safety management plan) is really an excuse to get around from disclosing faulty management systems or operations within the industry to the public,” Moshansky said.

He added that truly sensitive portions of an SMS document could be redacted so that the essential parts could be made public.

A spokesperson from Transport Minister Lisa Raitt’s office would not comment directly on the public availability of safety management systems, but said: “We are committed to working with our stakeholders to examine all means of improving rail safety and the safe transportation of dangerous goods.”

Spokespeople with Canadian National and Canadian Pacific said the companies file annual submissions detailing their SMS to Transport Canada every year — but the information contained within is confidential.

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“CN considers its SMS a confidential document for a number of reasons, including security,” said spokesperson Mark Hallman.

“For CP, the SMS documentation is internal to our railway and intended for managers and employees,” said spokesperson Ed Greenberg, adding it is also shared with unions.

Rex Beatty, president of Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, said he has been repeatedly lobbying for access to safety management plans on behalf of employees. Though a company is required in the legislation to communicate its safety goals to employees, Beatty claims a company’s SMS is “in the vault.”

“The employees, without the SMS, how do they know that the company is fulfilling its obligations?” he said.

Edward Burkhardt, chairman of Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway, the company involved in the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, said MMA has a “robust” safety management system that has been approved by Transport Canada.

“However, considering the amount of litigation now surrounding the tragedy, we have elected to keep this material private at present,” he said.

Transport Action Canada president David Jeanes cites one-man train crews as a practice the public may have questioned if there had been more transparency about company safety policies. Transport Canada allowed MMA to have one-man crews on its train in 2012 — something that has been identified as a possible factor in the Lac Mégantic tragedy.

“Had that been raised earlier, one doesn’t know if the questions might have resulted in the tightening up of that practice,” Jeanes said.

But Kevin McKinnon, director of regulatory affairs at the Railway Association of Canada, said there are logistical problems with providing a company’s SMS. It’s not “one document sitting on a shelf,” but entrenched in the company’s programs and culture.

“If you wanted to see a company’s SMS, they’d fill your office with paper,” McKinnon said. “I couldn’t post all this, it’s ridiculous. What kind of a site would hold all that?

“To turn around and have somebody post it somewhere so one or two people could look at it, there’s no business case for that.”

Canada Safety Council general manager Raynald Marchand agrees. In 2007, the council issued a scathing report on the SMS program in the rail industry, saying it allows “the industry to hide critical safety information from the public.”

But Marchand said the safety council has since been convinced the SMS program is safe, and doesn’t think it is necessary that the information be public.

“Obviously there’s big money at stake here, so they might object if there was something . . . that would give the competitive edge to another company,” he said.

That’s not a valid reason to keep safety protocols out of the public domain, said NDP transport critic Olivia Chow.

“A government’s first duty is to protect the public, not the bottom line of the rail companies — and, by the way, releasing this information would have no impact on their bottom lines anyway. What’s the excuse for not letting the public know?”

“It’s hard to imagine that there’s a huge competitive advantage in one SMS over another,” said Keith Stewart, an energy policy researcher with Greenpeace Canada.

“There’s a public interest in that if someone has developed a better way to do safety, then they should share that information.”