Public Accounts committee  Yes, Mr. Chair. We take the whole Auditor General's report very seriously, and we take any safety recommendation very seriously. We have implemented processes to make sure that if there are serious safety issues, we have a fast-track process to deal with them.

Public Accounts committee  I think that's pretty well covered. The idea of pulling the right people together at the right time on the right issue is really the mantra we're using in trying to adjust our consultative process and make sure that when there are critical safety issues, we respond in as timely a fashion as possible.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I don't know the specifics of the particular company that the member is talking about, but I would point out that in addition to interacting directly with inspectors, we have at least two ways in which the public or a member of a company can advise us of issues in the system.

Public Accounts committee  I'll let Mr. Eley handle that one.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry...?

Public Accounts committee  Essentially what it does is force the companies to constantly, from day to day, look at their safety issues to ensure that they're meeting the regulatory requirements or, indeed, exceeding the regulatory requirements. What we do is go in and verify that they have the systems in place to show us that they're doing that.

Public Accounts committee  With respect to SMS—safety management systems—right now, obviously, operators can apply them on a voluntary basis, and we support that very much, but they apply to air carriers of 20 passengers and above, which we classify as the 705 carriers. The next step for us, which we're assessing right now, is whether or not to introduce a regulatory requirement for SMS in the smaller carriers, the 10- to 20-passenger operations, and the 0- to 10-passenger operations, the air taxi operations.

Public Accounts committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, I don't have that information available to me at this point.

Public Accounts committee  That will be a real challenge in the short time we have available.

Public Accounts committee  Very quickly, have we improved our tools? Yes, we have. As a result of the AG's report? Obviously. The AG's report has helped us inform ourselves as to the areas that we need to improve. We have also improved them as we move to a system-based methodology. We had to change the methodology that our inspectors used to undertake the inspections.

Public Accounts committee  Right. It's with respect to communicating the risk to industry that you are talking about, is it not? Yes. I mean, this is an area in which we accept that our risk-based planning didn't have the rigour it should. We have undertaken, as we indicate in our action plan, the steps to develop a comprehensive system, a national-based system, one that assesses various factors consistently across the country with respect to the risk that a particular operator might pose.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, I should clarify that no companies that are carrying fare-paying passengers are not being inspected. We have established a risk-based system that will assign an inspection interval of between one and five years for a company, based on the detailed risk analysis that we have done of that particular company.

Public Accounts committee  The audit itself doesn't assess the utility of safety management systems, but I think I can quite readily state that safety management systems are accepted worldwide as a best practice, not only in the aviation industry but also elsewhere in the transportation industry. It's used in the shipping industry.

Public Accounts committee  I think the best way to describe a safety management system is to say it's a way of forcing operators to develop a system to ensure they are meeting a regulatory requirement. When I'm talking about this, I often use a very basic example of, perhaps, a taxi company. We might have a regulation that says the brakes on your taxi have to be a minimum of five millimetres thick.

Public Accounts committee  I think it really is a matter of us working in partnership with the industry and making sure that we both undertake to improve the safety culture in the system. That indeed was one of the major driving forces at Transport Canada in moving to a systems-based approach to regulation, to make sure that the carriers played their part in ensuring the safety in the system while at the same time allowing ourselves adequate oversight of the system to ensure that if any intervention is needed, we take it, we take it quickly, and it has the desired effect.