Dash Camera Regulations

Unifor is Canada’s largest private sector union, with more than 315,000 members across the country, working in every major sector of the Canadian economy.

Unifor has 46,000 members in the broader transportation sector, concentrated in federally regulated air (12,000), rail (11,000) and marine transportation (3,000). We have an additional concentration of membership in road transportation (20,000), operating under both federal and provincial regulation. Our members are employed by some of the largest firms in this sector, including DHL, Air Canada, NAV Canada, Marine Atlantic, CN Rail, CP Rail, VIA Rail and Coast Mount Bus Company, among others.

Unifor follows the following principles when it comes to assessing the implementation of surveillance technology in the workplace.

1. Unifor does not endorse or accept the reasonableness of employer policies.
2. If a new policy is proposed or introduced, Unifor will gather information on the use of the technology and ensure implementation is not having any negative impacts on the worker's health and safety or undermining the work environment.

Unifor considers the following factors for bargaining when surveillance technology is implemented:

1. Has the employer stated a need or purpose?
2. Has the employer demonstrated that need?
3. Does the policy and/or technology really serve that need?
4. Can the employer address its need in some other way?
5. Did the employer consider less intrusive alternatives?

Unifor locals will then attempt to bargain employee surveillance protections.

Unless there are explicit collective agreement protections, surveillance recordings can generally be used to support discipline. As such, we consider bargaining collective agreement limits on the use of surveillance to justify discipline.

Our bargaining principles can be easily applied when it comes to provincial regulatory frameworks attempting to impose mass surveillance technology on workers in an industry.

Unifor outlines the application of some of those principles in this submission. We are focused on the implementation of new technology that can be used for surveillance of workers which include forward-facing dash cameras.

Unifor's position is that current safety concerns in the BC trucking industry are not going to be addressed through the regulation of front facing cameras. Indeed, there no proof that data from front-facing cameras reduce accidents and make roads safer.

Unifor submits that most accidents involving oversized loads, crashes, and improper loads are caused by the lack of ability of the driver to reject loads. While increasing fines can and will help, the systemic issue relates to driver pay and protections.

Trucking safety regulations and enforcement programs must respond to specific incidents and the causes of those incidents.

The age of equipment in British Columbia continues to be an issue.

Regulations currently create disincentives for upgrading equipment. As such, the percentage of accidents for older vehicles as a proportion of accidents has not declined along historical trends.

"Older vehicles" are more involved in accidents because of the wear of the vehicles. If you have more older vehicles on the road, you are going to have more accidents.

Incident rates are directly affected by high levels of driver intimidation by shippers.

There is a low ability of drivers to refuse to take a load that violates regulations and safety.

The impact of owner-operator model without load refusal protections is that rejecting an illegal load come at a personal price of not getting future work. Regulations should be structured on the loads before the driver is asked to load the equipment or protect operators who refuse unsafe work.

Examining of oversized loads needs clearer, stronger, and less driver-focused monitoring. Oversized loads cannot be driver responsibility if driver/operator intimidation continues to be unaddressed.

Part of this regulation is to establish higher pay and better supports for operators and drivers. The choice should not be between doing something illegal or unsafe and reeving enough revenue to feed ones family.

Unifor supports more training for operators and company drivers and a certification system commensurate with the training requirements of the job. Truck operations should be recognized as a skilled trade as with other jobs of similar skill set. Such a regulatory move would allow standardization of operations and better regulation of the sector more generally.

Regulations must come with monitoring. Audits and regular checking of equipment is necessary to ensure safe vehicles are operating on the roads. Along with regulation enforcement, the cost burden of maintaining equipment at a high standard must come with minimum safe rates for owner operators.

Mistakes should not be repeated from the regulated introduction of Electronic Log Devices (ELDs) which established a log for regulation hours of operation. This implementation was done without a full accounting of the cost of enforcing hours on drivers.

Drivers lost hours from the ELD implementation, but did not receive pay to make-up for the enforcement of reduced hours. The result was simply a revenue reduction for owner operators and drivers.

The International Transport Federation's global Safe Rates campaign is about acknowledging that the cost pressures and systemic problems of low pay for drivers is at the heart of safety in the transportation sector. Enforcing rules around safety must come with safe rates of compensation for workers in the sector so workers do not bear the costs of safe roads alone.

Instead of establishing safe rates, Canada's trucking industry is facing increased downward pressures on compensation.

The worsening situation caused by the miss-classification of owner operators as independent contractors and the casualization within the trucking industry with the Driver Inc., platform, or shift to "gig fleets" is the primary cause. Sector-wide agreements on minimum standards, set through a process of union-backed bargaining, needs to be examined as a policy response and implemented.

British Columbia has an active Safe Rates model that it can lean on with the Office of the BC Container Commissioner. One part of the solution for Safe Rates would be to expand the mandate to other trucking services.

Technology should not be implemented in a way that collection, storage, or sharing of data contravenes privacy legislation.

Privacy of workers at work includes ensuring that monitoring of products and services does not explicitly or inadvertently intrude on an employees individual privacy.

Under Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) legislation, there are principles of collection of personal data. Unifor believes such rules should also apply to surveillance in the workplace of regular worker activities.

One such principle is that if there are other ways to achieve the outcome of the surveillance and data storage, that solution should be examined as an alternative.

As discussed in the Achieving Safety in Trucking section above, it is not clear to Unifor that the collecting of all driving data is the least privacy-intrusive way of achieving safety in the vehicle driving system.

Unifor believes that legislation that regulates the implementation of video surveillance technology should pass the reasonableness test under PIPEDA.

If cameras become a regulated fixture of the road transport sector, then the implementation of the securing, data storage, and rules of access to that data should meet the minimum privacy requirements outlined in PIPEDA for similar private information.

If there is regulation for access to work video data, there is a question of data collected during off-work hours for owner operators. Forward facing cameras are used by owner operators for personal insurance purposes at all times, but when the use of cameras is necessary for regulatory compliance, those personal and commercial uses of the technology may not align.

Clear exclusions for personal data should be outlined in the regulations.

Implementing new technology is not cost neutral, especially when that technology is implemented to increase safety of a system.

Forward facing cameras that meet a certain level of industrial safety, data storage security, and restrictive access implementation will be expensive in their implementation.

Unifor represents a significant number of owner-operators who will have to pay for the implementation of regulated cameras, data storage, and access requirements. These are going to be additional costs to owner-operators for little to no benefit to the operator themselves.

Unifor ask if it is the intention for costs associated with front-facing camera installation and data security to be absorbed by the sector?

If the government is going to regulate the implementation of forward facing cameras properly, those cameras will have to be of a certain industrial quality. The devices should be attached to the truck as to not cause accidents or interfere with the normal operations. Such standards should be set before adoption of any legislation, but will not come without increased costs.

It is a mistake to consider the collection of data itself as politically neutral. The use of data is political. And, the simple availability of large amounts of data creates incentives that are not always positive.

In addition, the way data is collected can change actions and can cause stress for operators. As such, the simple presence of a regulatory data capture device can increase the number of mistakes or change behaviour.

The issue of data collection "for increasing safety" means that if the data is stored, it can create incentives for employers and firms to want to use that data for other means.

Other means can include training self-driving vehicles to technology focused on worker discipline. Even under heavy regulation, the presence of the data itself creates a situation where changes could be made to legislation that will allow access for additional uses almost a certainty.

Using the "safety" data for things like discipline is an issue for Unifor members.

Drivers should be assessed through a fair and wholistic metrics, not simply through post-hoc examination of one or two kinds of biased surveillance data. This kind of data and use can be deployed for targeting some workers for discipline. Since no driver/worker is perfect all the time, storage of historical data can be an attractive pool of potential discipline applied at the whim of a manager without real cause.

With the use of AI, broad and biased disciplinary processes can be implemented more cheaply.

Workers should not face the constant threat of being disciplined for simply being human and not machines.

As safety system collect more data, there are many software companies selling products that use video feed monitoring to do AI prediction of high risk situations.

This system assess incoming data on the forward facing camera and passes it through an AI system of previous driving information. This information attempts to assess the risk level of the current driving scenario.

The use of AI as a predictor of risk in driving is an unregulated system. The sales of these toy surveillance systems might have some use in an unregulated consumer market (with the appropriate warnings), however the impact of these system on real drivers in real scenarios is not conclusive when it comes to safety of the vehicle and the health and safety of the drivers.