Transport Canada's overhaul of railway certification standards adds Crew Resource Management and targets human-factor rail occurrences
Transport Canada has published new railway worker training and certification rules that will replace a regime left largely untouched since 1987, part of a federal effort to reduce workplace injuries and cut the rail incidents tied to inexperience and human error.
The Railway Personnel Training and Qualifications Regulations were registered on June 22, 2026, and published in the Canada Gazette, Part II. They come into force in mid-2028, two years after publication, giving federally regulated railways a transition window to rebuild their training programs. The new rules replace the Railway Employees Qualification Standards Regulations, which have governed the sector since 1987.
What is changing for safety-critical rail positions
The regulations expand the list of positions declared critical to safe railway operations to include remote control locomotive operators and rail traffic controllers, two roles that grew in importance as train-yard technology evolved. Certification training for those positions is being expanded and clarified, and companies will have to create a training record for every worker and keep it for at least six years.
A central change is a new contact requirement. Anyone with less than two years of experience in a safety-critical position must be able to reach a colleague who holds a certificate for the same role and has at least two years of relevant experience. Passenger operations that run with two locomotive engineers on board are exempt, a carve-out that at present applies to VIA Rail. The provision replaces earlier "paired" language that industry felt implied two people working side by side, and it draws on lessons safety leaders have taken from Transportation Safety Board rail investigations into crew experience gaps.
Why Crew Resource Management now
The most significant addition is Crew Resource Management, a discipline long mandatory in aviation and marine transport but absent from rail training for decades. Transport Canada describes it as "a set of practices that uses all available resources to ensure safe operations."
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, quoted in the government's regulatory analysis, says "CRM training focuses on situation awareness, communication skills, teamwork, task allocation and decision-making within a comprehensive framework of standard operating procedures." Under the new rules, all training types must fold in threat and error management, interpersonal communication, situational awareness, leadership, teamwork, problem solving and decision making.
The move follows years of pressure from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB). The board recommended updating the old regime in June 2018 to close training and qualification gaps, called specifically for Crew Resource Management training in August 2022, and issued a safety advisory letter in 2023 after a fatal occurrence in Rivière-des-Prairies, Montreal, involving a conductor and a conductor trainee.
The safety case, and the price tag
Human factors dominate the underlying data, a pattern that speaks directly to how human factors contribute to serious workplace incidents. Transport Canada's analysis defines human factors as "all the elements contributing to a workplace accident that can be directly attributed to operators, workers, or other personnel," and reports that 86 per cent of the factors assigned to non-main-track collisions in 2022 were human-factor related. Between 2014 and 2020, Canada recorded roughly 8,088 rail occurrences, including 18 fatalities and 71 major injuries.
The regulations will apply to about 16,134 workers across 21 railway companies, 13 of them small businesses. Transport Canada estimates a total net cost of $31.77 million between 2026 and 2037. Because the safety benefits could not be put in dollar terms, the department relied on a break-even analysis: it estimates that a 27.45 per cent drop in training-related occurrences, roughly 35 fewer each year, would offset the cost.
What employers should do before 2028
The two-year runway is meant to give railways time to develop or update Crew Resource Management content, formalize familiarization and continuing training, and stand up the contact system for junior workers. These obligations arrive alongside broader changes to federal occupational health and safety requirements that safety leaders are already tracking. Once the rules are in force, non-compliance can draw an administrative monetary penalty of up to $250,000 under the Railway Safety Act, or prosecution for the most serious offences.
Transport Canada says "Canada maintains one of the safest rail transportation systems in the world, thanks to collaboration among many partners, but railway operations can be inherently dangerous."
