Transport committee  I can answer that because I'm briefing a lot of people about it. In the old days, we were maybe a little more into blameless, but nowadays...and the civilians are also using the same because.... I participate in some panels with civilian aviation. We're talking nowadays about the just culture, just culture being a limit to this blameless thing.

Transport committee  Again, what we do when we have a difficulty like that is my team will not investigate those matters. We will turn that information over to the chain of command. Normally the way that happens is we say that during our flight safety investigation we came across some serious allegations concerning something that you should investigate.

Transport committee  They know that, and I would say it's also to protect the military member. When I brief people everybody agrees with the just culture. No one wants to be working and not be able to trust one of their teammates because he is a drug addict or something like that and he's doing stuff that would put his life and the lives of others who he cares for in jeopardy.

Transport committee  That's a good question. First, before I go there, I just want to give some background to this thing. As I said, I'm in charge of the flight safety program. I want to make sure that free and open reporting is happening and people don't fear reporting. So that's why I would fight to keep the information of the OBR and the testimony not to be released, to be privileged.

Transport committee  Unfortunately, or fortunately, no member of my office's staff—not even those who have been there for 15 years—can remember a case where information was not provided, and I can't either. That has never happened. I can envision certain cases where that could happen, but it would be for reasons of operational security—for instance, during missions abroad such as those in Libya or in Kandahar, which has ended.

Transport committee  Quite frankly, I don't have an issue with funding.

Transport committee  With those new powers with this act it's not going to change anything, I mean, in the sense of funding and so on. I don't have to increase the number of people I have and so on. It's going to facilitate my work actually.

Transport committee  No. You will see when the report is out and you go through it, we do make some good recommendations. That may be some guys.... It's transparent. There's no interference. I haven't seen any of it. I took over this job last July and being away from that, because I was deployed on a mission in Haiti, I came back and I looked at that.

Transport committee  A bigger accident that has been investigated?

Transport committee  The recent one that you probably saw on TV was a controlled ejection over Moose Jaw where two pilots ejected and the aircraft crashed. That one is a top investigation right now. In July on the news a Sea King at Shearwater cut his tail and rolled on the side and self-destroyed.

Transport committee  No. We have a system. We have a book and a special annex that mentions what authority is delegated to certain types of investigators, and so on. The higher levels of those types of authorities will be retained here in Ottawa and will be delegated case by case if we assess that there's a need to delegate that.

Transport committee  You're bang on, I would say. Right now the only thing that enables us to go and get that information is a contractual arrangement that we have with them where they must participate and voluntarily release the information. This is good, as far as contracts go, but there could be some cases where they don't want to release that information.

Transport committee  I would add that we have a very good system and we have been a bit of a leader in that system, which started in 1942. At the time there were a lot of crashes because of the new jet engine, and so on. The core of our program is free and open reporting. In order to make sure that people feel confident that they can report without being disciplined, losing their job, or going to jail, we established that system where we protect testimony.

Transport committee  Actually, the good news is we try to invest a lot in prevention. When we do investigations, somewhere we have failed prevention. Prevention, as you know, is a very tough job. So the number is going down. I'm going around showing the stats right now, and we have fewer accidents than we had in the last 10 years.

Transport committee  There might be a little confusion, I'm not too sure, because this test is for the OBR. It's for the on-board recorder. It's not for the publication for the report, there is no test function. Actually, the default setting is we are going to publish it.