August 20, 2014
The Editors
The Toronto Star
1 Yonge St.
Toronto, Ontario
Dear Sir/Madam
Re: "Asleep at the safety switch - August 20. While the Transportation Safety Board has unquestionably provided a superb technical analysis of the Lac-Megantic disaster, it has accepted Transport Canada's basic approach to rail safety regulation - the essentially self-regulatory 'safety management system' model - as a given, and simply recommended that the department do a better job of implementing the system. The Lac-Megantic tragedy was a catastropic reguatory failure which begs much larger questions about the wisdom and adequacy of this approach. These are the kinds of questions that an only be effectively investigated through a judicial inquiry into the disaster. The federal government's refusal to establish such an inquiry suggests that it is more interested in blame avoidance than developing a full understanding of the causes of the disaster and the steps that need to be taken to prevent similar occurances in the future. The 47 innocent people who died at Lac-Megantic deserve a better legacy.
Yours sincerely,
Mark S. Winfield, Ph.D.
Associate Professor