Canadian National Railway (CN) has agreed to pay an $8 million fine for breaching the Fisheries Act following crude oil spills from two derailments in Northern Ontario during the winter of 2015, the Department of Environment announce.Blacklock's Reporter says the fines are in response to derailments near Gogama, Ontario, which resulted in the spillage of approximately 3.6 million litres of crude oil into nearby wetlands.The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) noted that extreme weather conditions, including temperatures as low as -30C likely contributed to the incidents by causing brittleness in the track.“Much more needs to be done to mitigate risk,” the TSB stated in an earlier report. Kathy Fox, then-chair of the Safety Board, highlighted the harsh weather conditions at the time of the derailments.Despite the incidents, investigators confirmed that CN was in compliance with extensive rail safety reforms implemented nationwide after the catastrophic 2013 Lac-Mégantic wreck in Quebec, which claimed 47 lives. These reforms included higher mandatory insurance coverage, more federal inspectors, and a commitment to phase out the puncture-prone DOT-111 model tank cars.The TSB’s investigation into the Gogama derailments revealed that CN met all new safety requirements. However, even the enhanced tank cars did not perform any better under the circumstances. “Even with the accelerated withdrawal of the DOT-111 tank cars and the enhanced specifications, they didn’t perform any better,” said Fox.The investigation attributed the derailments to a broken joint on a regularly-inspected piece of track. “The train was operated in accordance with company and regulatory requirements,” the report noted. “All the tank cars were in compliance with specification requirements.”The $8 million penalty will be paid into the Environmental Damages Fund, which Parliament established in 1995 to collect fines for breaches of the Fisheries Act, the Environmental Protection Act, and other statutes, and use the proceeds for conservation efforts. As of 2023, the Fund was valued at over $250 million, largely due to a $196.5 million payment from Volkswagen Canada in 2020 for breaches of the Environmental Protection Act.Volkswagen’s fine stemmed from the revelation that the company had equipped its “green” diesel cars with software to falsify nitrogen oxide emissions, which were nine times the legal limit. This scheme was uncovered in 2014 by researchers at West Virginia University. In addition to the environmental fines, Volkswagen paid $17.5 million for misleading advertising, marking the largest fine of its kind in Canada.
