
On Monday, May 12th, a SWAT team descended on Thomas Harding’s home just before 5PM. Camo-clad officers swarmed the property and forced Thomas Harding, his teenage child, and a family friend to lay face-down on the ground at gunpoint before handcuffing and hauling away one of three men being blamed for the Lac Megantic train derailment. All this according to Thomas Welsh, Thomas Harding's lawyer, who described the arrest of his client on Montreal's RadioX.
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If sold, there is no certainty that any punishment or liability would be transferred along with the company. Jean Pascal Boucher refused to comment on whether culpability could follow MMA to its new owner, stating only that he can not answer hypothetical questions.Distance seems to be the best defense against liability. Sure, Harding didn’t apply enough handbrakes before tucking in for the night, but it was the firemen who shut off the locomotive, allowing the air brakes to slowly leak and eventually unlock. It was a faceless person over a telephone who told Harding to go back to sleep and that everything was under control. And it was the Transportation Safety Board of Canada who established a voluntary safety standard for oil tankers (that standard is now in a three year transitional period to becoming mandatory for all oil cars operating inside of Canada).There is a wealth of people who contributed to last year’s tragedy. With a nine-fold increase in oil transported by rail over a measly two year period, an increase from 15,980 barrels a day of crude oil in early to 2012 to a stunning 146,047 barrels a day by the end of 2013—who is really to blame? Our legal system is bound by reasonable doubt, and those who divvy up annual profits are also the farthest from the daily operations. Are Harding, Demaître and Labrie really the most culpable, or are they simply the most vulnerable?