Canadian Safety Reporter

CANADIAN SAFETY REPORTER 3 Canadian HR Reporter, a Thomson Reuters business 2014 Armoured car industry not so secure Unions call for stricter safety standards in wake of recent robberies | BY LIZ FOSTER | RIDING IN an armoured car — protected against bullets and extreme tempera- tures — should be a secure feeling. But according to unions representing employees in the armoured car industry, there are few seats less safe. "This industry is inherently danger- ous," said Mike Armstrong, national representative for Unifor. "That's just a fact." A fact made all too clear in the wake of several attacks on armoured cars this year. A man in Longueuil, Que., was killed early in the morning on Feb. 1 when he tried to rob a two-person crew carrying cash from an ATM. On Jan. 20 a two-person crew was robbed at gunpoint outside the Fairview Mall in Toronto. Several shots were fired. Unifor, which represents 2,000 work- ers in the industry, reports there have been 70 attacks on armoured cars in Canada in the past 13 years. The attacks have resulted in three fatalities and two serious injuries. The union also reports an estimated $60 million has been fun- neled into organized crime in the last de- cade as a result of attacks on armoured cars. These statistics will never improve unless the industry overhauls its outlook on safety, Armstrong said. "There are no federal regulations sur- rounding this industry," he said. "It all comes at the expense of the health and safety of not only the workers, but of the public." Anyone can start an armoured car company in Canada and the lack of na- tional standards has resulted in a lack of continuity. While crews from larger companies — including Brink's, G4S and Garda — drive armoured vehicles and carry firearms, some smaller busi- nesses have unarmed employees driving soft-shell cars. "It's just an absolute disaster waiting to happen," Armstrong said. He explained the majority of attacks on armoured car crews are carried out by organized crime, and companies op- erating with only minimal safety proce- dures in place are putting their employ- ees at risk. Even the idea that armoured car crews are vulnerable puts employees at risk, said Jim Chalmers, director of Teamster Canada Armoured Car. "You have to be careful what you say because you don't want to jeopardize anybody," Chalmers said. "When you have reports in the media that question the capabilities and training of people working in the industry, saying they are understaffed and ill-trained, it attracts a whole new group of individuals who would have never considered robbing an armoured crew." Future examinations of industry safe- ty should take place in closed quarters, Chalmers said, with all parties recogniz- ing the sensitivity of street operations. But a nationwide meeting of the minds isn't likely to happen any time soon. Currently, there exists only mini- mal regulation in the industry with a patchwork of legislations governed across jurisdictions. While the federal government is re- sponsible for the Firearms Act — which establishes the conditions under which armoured car guards carry their weap- ons — rules surrounding the safety of vehicles and driver licensing are gov- erned by provincial highway traffic acts. "It's a scary industry to be in," said Paul Carson, director at Paragon Securi- ty. Carson, who has been in the industry for 27 years, has himself worked as both a messenger and a guard on armoured crews. "From a safety perspective it's not a tenable situation," he said of the current culture, citing the recent switch from three-person crews to two-person crews as a particular concern. "I've always worked on a three-man crew where we had a guard, a messen- ger and a driver," Carson said, calling the lack of sufficient safety practices "a coroner's inquest waiting to happen." Because robberies are an ambush scenario, employees have no time to Credit: Dan Riedlhuber (Reuters) Police forensic investigators remove a body from the scene of an armoured car robbery in which three guards were killed at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in June 2012. Continued on page 8

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