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Foulds hoping for further focus on transit safety

"Everyone deserves to be able to work and feel safe, no matter what they do."
transit-bus
Thunder Bay Transit bus picking up passengers at Lakehead University on Friday, March 1, 2024

THUNDER BAY – Everyone deserves to be able to work and feel safe, no matter what they do.

Current River Coun. Andrew Foulds, who is bringing forward a request to council on Monday, stressed that there’s a human aspect to transit operator safety that the city needs to do better at.

“The other reality is that there is a very serious financial reason why we need to do this properly,” Foulds said. “If we have workers that are off the job because they're injured at work, or on stress leave or mental health leave, it’s very costly and those things can impact service that we provide.”

Transit administration provided an overview of transit operator safety initiatives and incident reporting back in October, which was spawned from concerns brought forward by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 966, relating to an increase in incidents involving operators and availability of measures and resources to respond to situations.

The report included an overview of initiatives being undertaken by the newly established Employee Safety Task Force as well as other internal measures including education, training, programs and procedures.

Foulds is looking for support to have staff report back with transit operator safety initiatives by no later than March 10, 2025.

He stressed several things that he'd like the report to highlight.

“I want the public to know that we're taking this seriously, transit is serious and that the safety of their operators is taken seriously. We care about their work space and how they deliver that service.

“Public transit really matters. There are so many people that depend on it and I want them to have confidence that we are serious about this."




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