Britain accused of turning a blind eye to female genital mutilation

Britain's reputation for turning a blind eye on the illegal practice of female genital mutilation may be about to change after British doctors, nurses and midwifes decided to take a stand and demand it be treated as child abuse.

Earlier this month, leading British medical groups delivered an extensive report to Parliament, recommending aggressive steps to eradicate the practice, which is still being carried out on young girls from certain African, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. 

Dr. Deborah Hodes, a community pediatrician in the London borough of Camden, is an expert in the area of child safeguarding. (CBC)

The report revealed tens of thousands of cases of FGM in Britain (as many as 66,000 by some estimates). And while the practice was outlawed in 1985 and carries a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment, the country has never seen a single prosecution.

''It's a huge problem in Britain,'' says Dr. Deborah Hodes, a London community paediatrician and chair of child protection with the Royal College of Paediatrics, outlining that more than 24,000 girls are at risk of FGM and more than 66,000 women are living with the consequences. Hodes regularly gets referrals for young girls who underwent cutting — a common term for the practice in the U.K.— or who are at high risk of being cut.

Britain's medical community now wants all front-line health professionals to be better trained in detecting FGM and responding to it, and to report female patients who have had their sexual organs mutilated to police and other services.

FGM, sometimes called female circumcision, involves removing all or part of the clitoris as well as, often, the labia, the "lips" that surround the vagina, to make young girls more virginal and therefore attractive to future mates.

An estimated 140 million girls and women are living with the consequences of the practice, according to the World Health Organization, and in countries like Britain it is often done on young girls who are sent back to their ancestral homelands to have the procedure done. 

Leyla Hussein, a British woman, was once one of these girls. She was taken away to Somalia to be cut when she was seven. She's now campaigning to end the practice.

During her own pregnancy, she recalls, "I was shaking, having panic attacks, my body remembered the trauma. That's when I decided there was no way my daughter was going through that. But I needed the right information to defend my decision to my community.''

Soft-touch Britain

In Britain, anti-FGM campaigners are saying that an overzealous cultural sensitivity has led to authorities being slow to react on the FGM front, with some even questioning whether FGM is actually a British problem.

''It's not so much that I've encountered resistance, but there's a lot of silence," says Hussein. "For me when you're silent, you're consenting.''

In contrast, neighbouring France has adopted a much less tolerant approach to tackling FGM. Its systematic examination of young girls has led to some hundred prosecutions.

''I think England is very tolerant because they put cultural relativism first," says Isabelle Gillette-Faye, a French sociologist. "So if in your country of origin, you cut your girl, then it's possible in England as well.''  

In the western Senegalese village of Diabougo, a mother and daughter walk home after a meeting of women from several communities working to eradicate female genital mutilation. (Reuters)

Gillette-Faye suspects many French girls are sent to "easier" Britain to have the procedure done.

'It's easier to take the Eurostar to go to London, to a private clinic, and have someone cut the girl. It's just easier, it's less money than to go to another country,'' she says.

For her part, Hussein likes France's attitude towards FGM, but allows that an approach like that of the Netherlands' might be more effective.

"What the Netherlands have done really well," she says, "is implement that work in sexual education classes. It's compulsory. Front-line staff working with women and children, every new nurse, every new doctor, every new teacher, has to be trained on FGM.''

'Cultural sensitivity'

In Britain, the ministry of education has so far refused to make FGM training mandatory for teachers, though in a statement it said that "schools can choose to teach about FGM as part of their curriculum.''

That is not enough for some. ''We're talking about girls who are British citizens, and this is against their right to be safe," says Dr. Hodes. "So I don't really think it's a debate.'' 

As a result of the report, parliament's home affairs committee is considering an inquiry into why there hasn't been a prosecution yet in Britain. The Crown Prosecution Service is reportedly looking into a handful of cases that it may bring to trial. 

To date, there are not definitive studies of the number of girls at risk of FGM in Canada, but immigration patterns and human rights groups in Canada indicate that the figures could be substantial.  

'The biggest Somali community in the diaspora is in North America, that's a big alarm for me,'' says Hussein.  

''A lot of Canadian women contact us. They suffer in silence, they don't know where to go.''

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PMO emails: 3 questions raised by lawyer's account

The discovery of an email account previously thought to have been deleted — belonging to former Prime Minister's Office lawyer Benjamin Perrin ​— raises questions about the deletion policy and how the discovery came about.

Perrin was one of the PMO staffers who the RCMP allege knew about a deal between Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's former chief of staff, and Senator Mike Duffy. The RCMP allege Wright and Duffy committed bribery, fraud and breach of trust when Wright gave Duffy $90,000 to pay off the senator's questionable expenses. The RCMP allege Duffy agreed not to talk to the media in exchange for keeping his Senate seat and allowing Wright to pay off his expenses.

The discovery of an email account previously thought to have been deleted - belonging to former Prime Minister's Office lawyer Benjamin Perrin - raises many questions. (CBC)

RCMP Cpl. Greg Horton says Harper ordered the PMO to retain all staff emails in May 2013, in case investigators were to need them. In court documents filed last month, Horton said the RCMP were told Perrin's emails had already been deleted because he left the PMO at the end of March, before Harper gave the instruction.

But a letter released by Harper's spokesman over the weekend revealed that Perrin's email account was still accessible and would be turned over to investigators.

Here are three questions raised by that discovery.

1. Why does the Privy Council Office routinely break the rules by deleting email accounts?

The Privy Council Office is the civil service working for the prime minister, as opposed to the political staff who work for him in the PMO. It is the office that notified the PMO and the RCMP over the weekend that Perrin's emails were still available.

Treasury Board rules, the guidelines under which the public service operates, say records must be preserved unless they are "transitory," or messages that are only needed for a limited amount of time. That doesn't include "records required by government institutions or ministers to ... make decisions, or to account for activities of government," according to the guidelines. Guidelines for departing employees cover deleting transitory records and filing other records "so that the information continues to be accessible to other employees."

Still, the Privy Council Office letter to the RCMP says it is "operating protocol" to "close and delete email accounts of departing employees of the PCO and the PMO as a matter of course."

2. Why didn't the PCO know that the account still existed?

The letter from Isabelle Mondou, assistant secretary to cabinet at the PCO, says her office told the PMO that Perrin's emails had been deleted when he left at the end of March.

Twice in September 2013 the PCO repeated that when the PMO asked about Perrin's emails, Mondou wrote.

It wasn't until the end of November that the PCO discovered the account had been frozen and preserved, she wrote.

New Democrat Leader Tom Mulcair seized on that line in question period Tuesday.

"If Ben Perrin's emails were frozen due to 'unrelated litigation' as the Prime Minister's Office has claimed, wouldn't the head of legal operations have had those emails all along? Who did they ask?" he said.

Liberal Deputy Leader Ralph Goodale followed the same line of questioning.

"Who ordered the retention of Perrin's files? Who had custody of them? Has that person been unconscious for the past six months? And what is being done by the clerk of the Privy Council and the Department of Justice to ensure no more evidence is contaminated?"

Industry Minister James Moore, who answered questions in Harper's absence, pointed to Mondou's letter.

"The Privy Council Office has taken responsibility for the mistake that they made in not handing over the information to the RCMP," he said.

3. What made the RCMP keep asking questions about the emails?

Moore said in question period that the RCMP now have copies of Perrin's emails.

After being told in September that they weren't available, the Mounties went back to the PMO last week to ask whether there were other options.

The investigators contacted the PMO to see whether the emails were available from "any other source," Mondou says in the letter.

"In response to this inquiry on Nov. 29, 2013, we found that Mr. Perrin's emails had in fact been retained due to a litigation hold on an unrelated matter," she wrote.

Canadians will likely have to wait until the next RCMP affidavit is filed in court to see what was in Perrin's emails.

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Soldier's death becomes 4th apparent suicide to hit military in a week

Defence officials confirmed Tuesday that military police are investigating the death of a member of the Royal 22e Regiment at CFB Valcartier in Quebec as the fourth apparent Canadian Forces suicide in a week.

The Canadian military had already said it would be investigating the suicides of three veterans from the war in Afghanistan in less than one week.

Last Wednesday, the body of Warrant Officer Michael McNeil was found at CFB Petawawa.  A day earlier, Master Corporal William Elliott died at his home near CFB Shilo in southwestern Manitoba. Master Bombardier Travis Halmrast died in a Lethbridge, Alta., hospital after a suicide attempt in a jail.

Reports of this latest apparent suicide come as Liberal Senator Romeo Dallaire, arguably Canada's highest-profile military victim of post-traumatic stress, nodded off at the wheel and crashed into a traffic barrier on Parliament Hill.

The retired general later admitted that the news last week that three Canadian soldiers had killed themselves, coupled with the coming 20th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, have left him unable to sleep, even with medication.

Defence Minister Rob Nicholson implored those who are struggling to seek help.

"My thoughts and prayers continue to be with those who have been affected by these recent suicides," he said in a statement.

"We all have a role to play in reaching out to those who are hurting and encourage them to get help. I want to remind those may be going through difficult times that you are not alone and there is support available to get you through this."

Figures released by National Defence last summer reported that 22 full-time members took their own lives in 2011. The numbers for 2012 have not been made public.

Some have questioned the data because the figures apply only to regular force members, excluding reservists whose part-time designation means they fall under the jurisdiction of civilian agencies in their home provinces.

The Canadian Forces Member Assistance Program has a confidential 24/7 toll-free telephone advisory and referral service for all military personnel and their families. The number is: 1-800-268-7708.

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What helps drive online suicides? Web anonymity

A University of Guelph student's decision to stream his suicide attempt on the internet this past weekend raises the obvious question about what would drive him to want to end his life.

But equally perplexing is the fact that 200 people signed up to an online chat room to watch him do it — and in some cases goaded him on.

How could anyone take pleasure in witnessing another human take his own life?

Ian Colman, Canada Research Chair in mental health at the University of Ottawa, says part of the answer is that the anonymity of the web allows people to engage in conduct that they likely wouldn't in real life.

"The internet provides a medium through which we can be voyeurs to all sorts of human behaviour," he says.

But a key difference between witnessing a suicide online and seeing one in person, says Colman, is that you're less likely to take action when you see it on a screen.

He says the physical distance from the actual event leads to complacency and a "diffusion of responsibility," meaning those watching are less compelled to try and stop an event like this from being carried out.

In fact, in this case, some of those watching were actively encouraging the young man to go through with his threat, which he did by setting fire to his dorm room and crawling into bed while a webcam live-streamed the event.

That kind of perverse cheerleading can be another aspect of these online spectacles, some psychologists say.

The Guelph student announced his intention to take his life on 4chan, an anonymous message board that has become notorious for its controversial content.

4chan users quickly signed up to watch the video, even encouraging him to go through with his plans.

4chan has a longstanding reputation for anti-social behaviour, says Cole Stryker, author of the book Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web.

Aimee Morrison, an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, told CBC's The Morning Edition that the site is like "a perpetual sleepover party with no parental supervision."

Due to its anonymity, 4chan "encourages people to be as outrageous as they wouldn't be if they were operating under their real name," says Stryker.

He says 4chan posters poke fun at every conceivable subject and pride themselves on breaking taboos — in fact, suicide is a recurring topic.

In one of his 4chan posts prior to his suicide attempt, the Guelph student said he was going to be "an hero" — an apparently caustic reference to the death of Mitchell Henderson, a 12-year-old from Minnesota who committed suicide in 2006.

After Henderson died, friends started a memorial page on MySpace, where one poster repeatedly called him "an hero," an awkward phrase that some 4chan posters quickly adopted as a sneering verb for committing suicide.

"It was just a grammar mistake, but it became a meme where people [on 4chan] said, 'You should kill yourself, you should 'an hero,'" says Stryker.

The attitude of many of witnesses in this sort of situation, says Baillie, is that the individual is doing this to themselves, so "if I'm encouraging them, it's that they want to do it anyway."

Ian Colman, University of Ottawa, Canada research chair in mental health epidemiology. (University of Ottawa)

Colman says that what complicates this sort of extreme act is that despite the individual's bluster, it may in fact be an elaborate cry for help.

"They're struggling with something really difficult, and they don't know where to turn, and they're hoping that an extreme gesture like this will precipitate a major change in their lives, for the better," he says.

Even mental health clinicians can have trouble determining whether an individual is serious about taking his or her life, or is hoping for an intervention, he says.

"You can imagine if you're just somebody who's observing a situation online — it can be immensely difficult to figure out whether somebody's actually thinking of going through with something or not."

Desperate act

Officials at the University of Guelph confirmed that on Saturday night, a 20-year-old student apparently tried to kill himself by setting his fourth-floor room at the Dundas Hall residence on fire — while filming it on a webcam.

In the video, the student, whose name has not been released, sets the fire, turns off the lights and crawls into bed.

The Guelph Fire Department extinguished the blaze. The student suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries and is now in stable condition at Guelph General Hospital, according to the university.

Dr. Patrick Baillie, a senior psychologist with Alberta Health Services, says the basic explanation for wanting to watch such a spectacle is morbid curiosity.

He says it's the same reason so many people sought out the video of Luka Magnotta allegedly killing Chinese exchange student Jun Lin last spring, to the point where all that voyeurism crashed Best Gore, the site housing the video.

"These things have a certain shock value," he says.

Speaking specifically about the Magnotta clip, Dr. Baillie said "everybody knows precisely what's in this video, and yet people are going for that gruesome, wow-I-haven't-seen-something-quite-like-this-before."

With files from Andrea Bellemare

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Train operators breaking more safety rules

Wayne Easterbrook and his wife were among dozens injured on Feb. 26, 2012, when a Via Rail train they were on flew off the tracks in Burlington, Ont., killing three.

"People make errors. It's part of being human," the Kingston, Ont., resident acknowledged, "but if there's anything out there that can be purchased to assist people in doing their job, especially when it comes to safety, then the government, or in this case the company, Via … should spend the money."

But Easterbrook, whose wife suffered a punctured lung and a fractured collarbone, was troubled to learn that cases such as the Burlington derailment, where crews failed to obey a signal, are happening far more frequently than he'd thought.

"If it's repeating and happening all the time and they're not doing anything to fix it, that's a big problem to me," he told CBC News.

Transportation Safety Board (TSB) records obtained by CBC News suggest the Via Rail incident is part of a larger, growing problem — rules intended to keep trains from colliding or hitting work crews on the ground are increasingly being broken.

A catch-all category technically called "movement exceeding the limits of authority" captures any time a train speeds, fails to obey stop signs or enters a part of the rail system where it's not allowed.
 
In recent years, these types of infractions have been steadily climbing, hitting a decade-long high of 120 last year, according to the Transportation Safety Board's rail occurrences database obtained through the Access to Information Act by CBC News, some details of which are being made public for the first time. Trains broke the rules at least 1,353 times in the past 13 years.

"It's like when like when you drive through a stop sign or a red light. You may be lucky. There may be no other vehicle … but the possibility is always there," said David Jeanes of Transport Action Canada, a transportation advocacy group.

"Some of the most catastrophic railway accidents, particularly involving passenger trains, have occurred when trains have gone too fast or they've gone through stop signals," added Jeanes.

Fatigued, distracted crews

A number of provinces reported a rise in the number of infractions on their rails, including Alberta where the yearly figures doubled in the past decade to 31 last year, but others, such as Ontario, are seeing a steady decline.

The Burlington crash is not the first such incident. In early 2010, a Via train crew failed to stop after misreading a signal near the southern Quebec village of Saint-Charles-de-Bellechasse. The train derailed and smashed into houses and cars, injuring two locomotive engineers and five passengers.

Two years earlier, a Canadian Pacific Railway freight train failed to stop and hit the tail end of another train, causing cars filled with glycol, vinyl acetate and liquefied petroleum gas to derail and go up in flames near Ralph, Sask.

Other cases of failing to obey signals involve fatigued crew members unaware of what station they are at or distracted by their cellphones.

However, none of the above cases fall under the TSB's publicly reported figures for infractions — movement exceeds limits of authority — because the incidents were identified solely as derailment or collision and not attributed to the underlying infraction.

Among the cases in the database never investigated are trains travelling nearly 20 kilometres on a main track before the realization they shouldn't be there, others stopping less than a kilometre apart and many that came too close to hitting crews working on or near a track.

In one 2011 incident, a local Ottawa passenger train, the O-Train, travelling 55 km/h through the city, almost runs into a crew working on the Rideau River Bridge. Workers managed to get away but it was deemed a "near-miss."

Repeated calls for action

Rail safety experts and the TSB have repeatedly called for the federal government to bring in automatic anti-crash systems that can slow down trains detected to be speeding or those failing to stop.

'It's a little unusual for the TSB to be publicly criticizing the government, but certainly reflects a measure of frustration.'- Transport Action Canada's David Jeanes

Several weeks ago, the independent agency sent out a press release criticizing Transport Canada for a "lack of firm action" on two key recommendations it made after the deadly Via crash last year that could prevent similar accidents.

The TSB had asked that the government require companies to add physical controls that can stop trains when signals are disobeyed and in-cab audio and video recordings so investigators can better understand what led to a crash.

The automatic controls have been recommended by TSB for years, while mandatory audio recordings have been recommended for a decade.

"Their implementation will bring down the risk of another accident like Burlington," TSB chair Wendy Tadros said in the press release.

The federal independent agency that investigates rail safety couldn't conclusively determine the cause without in-cab voice recordings, but it said the crew misperceived the signal to slow down.

"It's a little unusual for the TSB to be publicly criticizing the government, but certainly reflects a measure of frustration," said Jeanes.

Via Rail said it's looking at installing in-cab recorders on its locomotives and is examining options for fail-safe controls, even though Transport Canada hasn't mandated either.

TSB says signal errors happen about once a month in Canada.
 
Passenger trains have been involved in at least 135 infractions since 2000, with 2012 marking the highest year, according to the database.

About 70 of those involve Via Rail, Canada's largest commuter rail operator. Twenty-one of the infractions involve failing to stop. One case resulted in a minor injury. Via says it has never been sanctioned or fined by Transport Canada.

"One incident is an incident too many and we take them all serious," said Marc Beaulieu, Via Rail's chief of transport, but he added that the cases are "extremely rare" and can happen for various reasons.

"It could be a mechanical issue, it could be an operator error, it could be a miscommunication by radio," said Beaulieu.

Via said its numbers of infractions have fallen in recent years thanks to increased training and electronic monitoring of train speeds.

Money vs. safety

Montreal's regional commuter train operator, AMT, which experienced 22 occurrences since 2000, with nearly a quarter of them in the past year, said other factors are also at play.

Montreal's regional train service, AMT, says infraction figures may also be on the rise due to trainspotting errors and training. (CBC)

"In the rail industry, there's a lot of movement going on regarding employees. A lot of people going into retirement, they are replaced by younger people," said Stephane Lapierre, AMT's vice-president of operations. "Training becomes the hardest thing to do."

Lapierre also notes that trainspotters on platforms also make errors when guiding a train in.
"If you go past a signal, trying to spot your train on the platform properly, you need permission to back up, so the infractions could be as small as that," said Lapierre.

At least 56 of the infractions, or about 4 per cent, involved trains carrying dangerous goods somewhere on the train, though none of those cars spilled over.

Ensuring that companies follow the rules is an issue the United States is also struggling with.

A New York City commuter train travelling three times the allowed speed on a curve flew off the rails over the weekend, killing four and injuring dozens. It's still unclear whether human error or faulty brakes are to blame.

Similar crashes in recent years spurred the U.S. government to legally require all companies by 2015 to implement so-called positive train control, an automatic anti-crash system that can halt a train that is speeding or at risk of a crash.

Jeanes said Canada has decided to take a wait-and-see approach, watching the U.S. for signs that the costly systems prove worthwhile, though most industrialized countries have introduced the automatic train control systems.

But that approach isn't good enough for Easterbrook.

"They have the technology to fix it," he said. "The will should be there. I don't think money should be placed above human safety."

Send tips on this and other stories to dave.seglins@cbc.ca and john.nicol@cbc.ca.

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Calgary weather: Rough road conditions as snow continues

Plows and graters are chugging along Calgary streets this morning as the blizzard that set in yesterday hammers the city and region this morning.

Despite overnight work from road crews, it will be another challenging commute again today, say city officials. 

Residential areas in particular are troublesome, as many have not seen a plow come through since the storm hit Monday.

For those who need to travel, Calgary police suggest using major thoroughfares only.

Calgary police say that in the last 24 hours, they have responded to over 200 crashes, 24 that involved injuries.

"Our units were responding all night to people that were stranded, as well as helping them out when they ended up having accidents," said Duty Insp. Guy Baker.

Police are recommending people stay off the roads.

Calgary Transit is warning about detours and recommend commuters check their website before heading out Tuesday morning. 

Most Calgary schools are open, but there is no bus service. 

Travel in and out of city

At least 29 WestJet and Air Canada flights have been cancelled so far this morning at Calgary International Airport.

The Trans-Canada Highway remains shut down from Calgary to Brooks, Alta. Overnight, Strathmore volunteer firefighters rescued stranded motorists caught in the whiteout conditions. The highway may open at some point later Tuesday.

In central Alberta, Red Deer opened an Emergency Operations Centre. It was activated to co-ordinate a response to the storm. Crews worked through the night to clear roads deemed inaccessible to emergency vehicles.

School bus service suspended 

All Calgary Board of Education schools are open, but bus service is cancelled. No decision has been made yet on afternoon bus service. The school board is asking parents to make their own decisions about whether to send their child to school. 

Calgary Catholic Schools District schools open, but bus service is cancelled for both the morning and afternoon.

Calgary French and International School open, but buses will not be running this morning.

Foundations for the Future schools open, but no bus service.

Red Deer public school bus service cancelled. 

No buses running for Rockyford, Hussar, Standard and Palliser Regional Schools. 

School closures 

In Calgary, Mountain View Academy, Almadina School Society, Edelweiss Preparatory School, Janus Academy and the Calgary Girls' School are all closed. 

In the wider area, Catholic schools in Airdrie, Cochrane and Chestermere are closed. 

All public and Catholic schools in the Rockyview school division. Strathcona Tweedsmuir, Providence, Morley as well as Edison Private in Okotoks and all Siksika Board of Education schools are closed.

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Runaway trains almost triple the reported rate, CBC finds

Two Decembers ago, a train rolled uncontrolled for 24 kilometres, reaching a speed of 100 kilometres an hour before eventually coming to a stop near the eastern Quebec town of Sept-Iles.

Five months earlier, 33 CN cars escaped from a yard near Edmonton and travelled more than five kilometres onto a line carrying residues of gasoline, diesel fuel and sulphuric acid in their tanks.

Cases like these — referred to technically as runaway rolling stock — happen on average 35 times a year, far more often than previously thought, CBC News has learned after examining a railway database kept by the Transportation Safety Board (TSB).

After this summer's Lac Megantic tragedy — in which 47 people died when a parked train that was insufficiently secured ran down a hill, derailing and exploding — there have been calls for increased scrutiny of rail safety, including in last week's auditor general's report.

Until now, TSB annual reports from 2000 to 2012 only identified 158 runaways, counting an incident as a runaway only when it was the primary issue reported to safety inspectors.

But CBC News analyzed the complete TSB rail database of so-called incidents and accidents obtained through access-to-information and discovered that runaways have been involved in more than 300 other cases.

Click on rail safety map: Find runaway trains near your community

"This is news to me," said David Jeanes, head of Transport Action Canada, a rail-safety consultancy, who regularly reads the TSB's annual reports.

Few runaways investigated

Instead, the majority of runaway train cases remain unreported publicly because they are categorized instead as derailments or collisions — without any indication that the train was rolling away uncontrolled at the time.

"If a runaway causes derailment or collision, it will be reported as this higher consequence occurrence," said TSB spokesperson Rox-Anne D'Aoust.

For example, the Lac Megantic tragedy, when 74 crude-oil laden cars ran unmanned down the tracks into the community of 6,000, wouldn't be counted among the publicly reported runaways based on the TSB definitions.

A look at the unreported runaways reveals that not only are railway cars improperly or inadequately secured in yards, but trains — including those with passengers — have separated while in transit.

Oftentimes, the cars don't collide with other trains, derail or cause deaths, but they raise questions about the ability to secure railway cars in place.

But only nine of the 459 runaway-related occurrences — or about two per cent — have been fully investigated by the TSB, the independent agency charged with finding ways to make the rail industry safer.

"Looking at incidents is one thing that helps you prevent accidents," said Jeanes, saying more of the smaller issues should be examined.

Jeanes notes that the TSB recently pleaded with Transport Canada, the federal rail regulator, to take faster action to implement their recommendations to help fix some of the issues.

The TSB's D'Aoust said she couldn't comment directly on why only nine of the 459 runaways were investigated, but she says they depend on the experience of the TSB's 18 investigators across the country to determine what type of incident could produce the most worthwhile recommendations.

Flammable, corrosive freight

The database turns up a number of runaway near-misses that haven't been publicly reported:

• A VIA Rail engineer had to bring his train to a stop to avoid hitting a runaway gondola car up ahead near Breslau, Ont. (Aug. 16, 2009)
• Two CN freight cars, including one containing the highly flammable chemical vinyl acetate, rolled for 10 kilometres along a heavily travelled main track near Longueuil, Que. (Jan. 18, 2005)
• A CN freight train lost more than 300 metres of cars that ran uncontrolled before coming to a stop near Huntsville, Ont. (Jan. 29, 2004)
• Two CN cars full of corrosive anhydrous ammonia ran uncontrolled onto the main line from Port Robinson near Niagara Falls, Ont. until a citizen spotted the cars and reported them. (Aug. 19, 2001)

Runaways have also led to the deaths of at least five railway workers during the 13-year period — four of which happened in mountainous B.C.

In fact in one area of the Kootenay mountains in Trail, B.C. there have been three runaways from 2002 to 2007 along CP rail lines.

They've included unmanned trains careening down the mountains with cars loaded with anhydrous ammonia and sulphur dioxide and travelling through areas at more than double the maximum speed of 30 kilometres an hour.

In a 2007 case in that area where the train was occupied, three crew members tried to control the train but its brakes sent up a cloud of smoke. Two of the employees jumped for their lives, while the third, 51-year-old engineer Lonnie Plasko, was found dead in the derailed locomotive.

The Lac Megantic tragedy, when 74 crude-oil laden cars ran unmanned down the tracks into the community of 6,000, wouldn't be counted among the publicly reported runaways based on the TSB definitions. (Ryan Remiorz/Canadian Press)

​

Dieter Bogs, the mayor of Trail, B.C., recalls that 2007 derailment tragedy but was surprised to learn from CBC News about two previous runaways in his community that involved dangerous goods.

"I'm not very happy about that," Bogs said, adding that both he and emergency responders in the area need to know about runaways, even if the trains don't derail.

"It's important because we have to have the systems in place to respond to that," said Bogs. "It's absolutely important that we know that the people in our community are not going to be subject to the same incident that took place in Quebec."

British Columbia ties with Quebec for the third highest number of runaway cases from 2000 through 2012, with 73 incidents each. Ontario leads with 124, followed by Alberta's 101.

Trains roll across border

Another surprising revelation from the database is that two freight cars have rolled unmanned across the border from U.S. yards into Canada — one from Norton, Vt., in 2010 and another from Niagara Falls, N.Y. last year.

In the 2010 incident, a boxcar full of paper from Vermont travelled 50 kilometres on its own -- undetected by Canadian border agents and the railway — coming to rest near Lennoxville, Que.

"The car reached high speeds and crossed several public crossings," says the TSB database record from the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railway, though it adds that no dangerous goods were involved, and no injuries or derailment reported.

"That stretch of rail is a dark area (with no electronic monitoring) so we had no way of detecting it," Mario Brault, president of the small railway that operates between Montreal and Portland, Maine, told CBC News this week.

"The box car rolled through many road level crossings. Some of them had signals and gates, but some of the crossings were 'unprotected,'" he said, acknowledging the potential of a collision with cars or trucks at the crossing.

Employees of the company were disciplined for not securing the car with enough brakes.

Almost a quarter of the 459 runaway occurrences in the past 12 years involved dangerous goods.

Although many of them are contained to railway yards, the runaways can lead to collisions with other trains, as happened in 2011 in Prince George, B.C., when CN tank cars full of diesel fuel, sodium chlorate and sulphuric acid hit another train in the yard.

Incidents largely minor: CN

Mark Hallman, a spokesmen for CN, said the instances of CN trains and or railcars running uncontrolled "are important leading safety indicators of which CN is cognizant, takes seriously and continually addresses through its safety practices."

But Hallman added that the vast majority of such incidents are minor, slow speed switching accidents in CN rail yards.

To try to combat the problem, Hallman says train crews are given specific charts on how many handbrakes to use, based on the weight and gradient of an incline.

So-called derails are placed at the edges of yards to stop uncontrolled cars from entering main tracks, noted Hallman.

A CBC examination of the rail database includes examples where the derails have not worked. Interestingly, railway cars were sometimes moved by high winds.

Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for CP, said they take safety seriously and notes that the company has "changed a lot over the years with proactive steps to enhance safety through the communities in which we operate, including further developing information-sharing with local officials."

VIA Rail acknowledges eight cases since 2000 where their passenger cars have runaway. VIA spokesperson Jacques Gagnon told CBC News each incident was a temporary 'break away' where passenger cars 'uncoupled' from a locomotive triggering, automatic emergency brakes which he says safely stopped the cars.

In five of the cases passengers were on board the trains, some of which were travelling at high rates of speeds, when the emergency brakes kicked in. Three incidents happened in a rail yard.

Gagnon says there was only one minor injury in all of the VIA cases.

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Lost and found PMO emails yet another Wright-Duffy plot twist: Chris Hall

It's said the Mounties always get their man. Well, investigators looking into the Nigel Wright-Mike Duffy affair finally got their missives.

RCMP investigators were undoubtedly pleased to get their hands on the PMO emails they'd been told no longer existed, even though it's far too early to know what's actually in the messages of the prime minister's former lawyer, Benjamin Perrin, or what impact his words will have on the on-going investigation.

What is clear is that Perrin, as Stephen Harper's legal counsel, played a prominent role in the negotiations to get Senator Mike Duffy to repay $90,000 in improper expenses.

The RCMP documents that rocked official Ottawa two weeks ago are studded with references to Perrin. In particular, he is named in numerous exchanges related to the five conditions Mike Duffy set for repaying his expenses

One of those references is the pivotal Feb 22 email from Harper's former chief of staff Nigel Wright who indicated they were ''good to go from the PM'' once Perrin and Duffy's lawyer signed off on the media lines for the Senate committee probing the expenses.

Perrin was also among the handful of top Conservatives who knew Wright had decided to pay back Duffy's expenses himself — something the prime minister maintains he didn't learn until May 15, when it all became public..

New life to an old scandal

So, not surprisingly, the mere existence of Perrin's emails, absent any hint of their actual contents, is generating great interest on Parliament Hill, and giving new life to a scandal the prime minister just can't seem to put behind him.

"Why has the government changed its story once again?" NDP leader Thomas Mulcair demanded right off the bat in question period Monday.

Benjamin Perrin, a UBC law professor, was the special adviser and legal counsel to the prime minister from 2012-13. (CBC)

Liberal MP Dominic Leblanc picked it up from there. He called the lost and found emails part of an established pattern in the prime minister's office to try to whitewash any investigation into Duffy's expenses.

"So considering the lack of trust Canadians have in this prime minister and his office, can the prime minister assure Canadians that no member of this staff had access to these emails from Mr. Perrin and was able to delete, doctor, alter or whitewash his emails as well.''

The prime minister followed his usual pattern of not attending question period on Mondays. So the answers fell to junior cabinet minister Pierre Poilievre, the government's responder of choice when the going gets toughest.

Playing the role for which he was cast, Poilievre accused both Mulcair and Leblanc of taking more than the usual liberties with the facts.

For one, he said, the insistence that Perrin's emails had been destroyed came from the Privy Council Office — the bureaucratic department that serves the prime minister — and not the PMO.

For another, the bureaucrat in charge confirmed in writing to the RCMP that the mistake was theirs and theirs alone, and that the normal protocol is indeed to erase the emails and email accounts of PMO staff once they leave.

Perrin's were discovered, the PCO letter added, only after the RCMP asked again if any back-ups existed.

They had been preserved, apparently, because of an on-going lawsuit unrelated to the Wright-Duffy affair.

A plausible rationale. But it does make you wonder why simply typing ''Perrin'' into the search function failed to produce the same result months ago.

"The operative verb here is to read,'' Poilievre admonished the opposition.

As soon as the PCO confirmed Perrin's emails had been found, he added, "the prime minister said that the information should be shared with the RCMP and the existence of the emails should be made public.''

Added information for investigators

In other words, Poilievre was saying, there was no cover-up. The reappearance of the emails had nothing to do with the PMO, or any members of its staff, just as those same folks had nothing to do with their alleged destruction.

What he neglected to mention was that Harper's staff waited two days before making the news public, and held back on the announcement until after the prime minister had stepped to the stage on Sunday at a gala fundraiser in Toronto.

But perception is the least of the government's challenges right now in light of Perrin's suddenly retrievable emails, even if you include why the RCMP continued to ask for them long after being told they no longer existed.

The opposition argues that their appearance further undermines the government's credibility and its version of the events that led to Wright digging into his own pocket for the $90,000 Duffy needed to repay.

The government response is that it was a bureaucratic foul-up. Plain and simple.

Either way, the RCMP now has another source of inside information about the events that led to the Wright-Duffy deal — from a senior adviser who had unique access to the prime minister as his lawyer.

RCMP documents already released show that Perrin was in regular contact with Duffy's lawyer starting Feb 19 as the PMO sought to deal with a problem that had defied every solution.

Perrin was also copied on many emails sent by Wright and others. Investigators want to know what he said in reply, even if it only confirms what they already know.

But these particular emails are not the only new source of information that will soon be in investigators' hands.

The RCMP has also asked for the emails of senators Marjorie Lebreton, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen and David Tkachuk. The three Conservative senators were in regular contact with the PMO about how to handle the Duffy affair.

Investigators were critical of all three in documents made public two weeks ago, suggesting their answers on the PMO's attempt to influence the Senate committee report on Duffy were at odds with the evidence.

Senate speaker Noel Kinsella confirmed Monday that the Senate waived its customary parliamentary privilege over its affairs to ensure that can't be used as "a shield to inhibit a police investigation.''

As they say, the Mounties always get their missives.

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Obama's foreign policy pivot stalls with 'cheesed off' allies

When U.S. President Barack Obama took over the White House in 2008, he set out to transform U.S. foreign policy into one that would forge better relationships with traditional adversaries and restore America's image, which had taken a severe hit during the George W. Bush years.

But the president has learned that crafting such relationships, regardless of who is in the White House, can be challenging when American interests inevitably clash with those of other states.

"I think he's grown up. He's kind of taken a cold shower," says Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at the Walsh school of foreign service and government at Georgetown University in Washington. 

"I would say that there was a certain geopolitical naivety at the beginning," Kupchan told CBC News. "There was a sense that the U.S. could go out and forge relationships based upon mutual interests and mutual respect, and that there wasn't an intrinsic competitive dynamic to international politics."

This competitive dynamic has been on full display over the past few months as Obama has been beset by a number of foreign policy headaches.

In just the past few days, for example, tensions have increased between the U.S and China over Beijing's declaration of an air defence zone over the East China Sea.

Meanwhile, despite all the initial hype of pushing the so-called reset button with Russia, relations between Washington and the Kremlin remain cool over Syria as well as Moscow's granting of asylum to former NSA employee and document leaker Edward Snowden. 

Aaron David Miller, a foreign policy expert and scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, said that certain geopolitical realities have hindered Obama's efforts.

"Even though at the beginning he hoped to be a transformative president, both domestically and abroad, he has failed to deliver on each," Miller said in a recent interview.

But it's not just America's former Cold War adversaries that have been creating problems, U.S. allies also seemed perturbed with the administration.

"Pick a region of the globe and in all likelihood America's allies located there have a valid case for being cheesed off at Washington," Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, near Boston, wrote recently in the journal Foreign Policy.

A case in point: the tentative deal reached with Iran regarding its nuclear energy program could lead to a signature foreign policy achievement for the president, but it has certainly caused a rift with two stalwart allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Irritating allies

It's no secret that Obama has had a difficult relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been outspoken in his opposition to any kind of rapprochement with Iran.

But some Saudi officials have also been uncharacteristically vocal in criticizing the White House over its overtures to Iran, as well as its hesitancy to involve itself directly in the Syrian conflict.

Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan: 'Obama's in an awkward space right now.' (Council on Foreign Relations)

Meanwhile, in Egypt, U.S. cuts to military and foreign aid following the ouster of former president Mohammed Morsi has soured relations to the point that Egypt's foreign minister last month said that U.S-Egyptian relations were in "turmoil."

And then there's Europe where American drone strikes and other anti-terror practices have festered into human rights issues, angering many Europeans and their governments, Kupchan said.

What's more, he adds, the revelations of National Security Agency spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel has "caused an enormous amount of discomfort in Europe" and is "the most significant transatlantic breach since the Iraq war."

"All that adds up to putting Obama in an awkward space right now with respect to his relations with key partners," Kupchan said.

For his part, Drezner wrote that Obama has done as poor a job as former president George W. Bush when it comes to  "gardening" relationships, that is, regularly consulting with U.S allies so they will at least feel they are in the loop if issues come up between them.

"Irritating allies is an occupational hazard of being a superpower," Drezner wrote. "And there are times when policy shifts or espionage is warranted. The point of gardening is to make sure that these irritations don't become full-grown thorns."

The China pivot

Critics have also complained that Obama has failed to invest in the administration's so-called pivot to Asia strategy, questioning the recent decision to cancel a visit to a number of Southeast Asian countries, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in October. (Obama decided to stay in Washington to deal with the debt ceiling crisis).

It "was a blow to America's image in Asia, where symbolism is everything," Ian Storey, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, told the Wall Street Journal.

"It projects the image that America is politically dysfunctional and fiscally irresponsible, and not as committed to Asia as the Obama administration would have us believe," he said.

Still, Miller says that while Obama may have fuelled unrealistic expectations when it came to foreign policy, many of the setbacks can not be laid at his feet, and that there's only so much even a U.S. president can do.

"I see Obama functioning in a cruel and unforgiving world," he said. "I think the circumstances for this president, abroad, have been very difficult."

Miller argues that on some of the administration's core interests —  protecting the homeland, extracting the U.S. from two wars, testing the proposition of negotiating with rather than confronting the Iranians — Obama is "actually doing pretty well."

Some close foreign policy watchers have also suggested that Obama has made some inroads with Russia, specifically in co-operating against terrorism. And before the recent flare up with China, progress was being made, most importantly in getting Beijing to take a tougher stance with North Korea.

"I think that when the dust settles, he will be seen as a president that did succeed in repairing relations with many countries," Kupchan said. "I think we are in a valley right now and I don't expect this to be a new normal. Expect it to kind of rebound."

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PotashCorp to slash hundreds of jobs

Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan is cutting its workforce by about 18 per cent, affecting about 1,045 people — with the biggest hits in its home province of Saskatchewan as well as Florida and New Brunswick.

The Saskatoon-based company says the decision is necessary because of soft demand for potash and phosphates, which are used to make fertilizer.

"This is a difficult day for our employees and our company," said Bill Doyle, PotashCorp's president and chief executive.

"While these are steps we must take to run a sustainable business and protect the long-term interests of all our stakeholders, these decisions are never easy.

"We understand the impact is not only on our people, but also in the communities where we work and live, and PotashCorp will work hard to help those affected through this challenging time."

PotashCorp says the biggest job cuts will be in its home province, where 440 people will be affected — about 42 per cent of the total affected by the downsizing.

Most of those will be at its Lanigan, where two mills will suspend production by the end of 2013, and Cory, where production will be reduced, and the Saskatoon headquarters.

New Brunswick will also see 130 people affected while the rest will be outside Canada, including more than 435 in the United States.

Florida will lose 350 jobs while another 85 people will be affected in North Carolina.

One of two phosphate plants in White Springs, Fla., and the Suwannee River chemical plant, will be closed. A loss of capacity at White Springs is expected to be partially offset by higher output at Aurora, N.C.

There will another 40 jobs affected in other parts of the United States and in Trinidad.

PotashCorp is Canada's largest producer of potash, which is sold around the world to help farmers boost crop production.

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