Transport committee  I was speaking about the dangerous goods inspectors. The issue is that the dangerous goods inspectors come from their environment. You have civil aviation dangerous goods inspectors whose experience is with aviation. You have rail inspectors and you have marine inspectors. But wh

Transport committee  I'll try to respond to that. We do have an enforcement group at Transport Canada. The inspectors themselves used to be part of the enforcement group, and they were the ones that would make the recommendations or give the order and go to court. Now it's a two-step process, and aga

Transport committee  That would be very true, but when we look at the dangerous goods directorate at Transport Canada, they have gone from what I would say are the specialists to the generalists, because the dangerous goods directorate is now multimodal. The dangerous goods inspectors are no longer r

Transport committee  That is correct.

Transport committee  That is correct. The staffing freeze is in place because Transport Canada used operational dollars over the last two years to meet their salary dollars. Treasury Board has instructed them to go back and meet the salary envelope. That's the situation. The deputy minister has sent

Transport committee  What it looks like on the ground is that the focus is all on SMS audits. The inspectors are spending less and less time doing unannounced inspections and oversight. In rail, in theory they have two sets of employees. One set is auditors and one set is inspectors. However, given

Transport committee  I just want to add that the biggest problem is the fear. If they don't have strong enough whistle-blower protection and it's not clear enough, they are afraid to come forward when they see things like shortcuts being taken, etc., because they know they're going to lose their job.

Transport committee  We support SMS as an additional layer. There can never be too much safety consciousness. However, the problem is, it's not an additional layer; it's become a replacement layer. I can tell you here that there will rarely be unannounced inspections. Whether it's rail or whether i

Transport committee  The answer to that would be emphatically no. While they went on hiring and attempting to hire, the money was not associated with it. While the department was told by the former Minister of Transport that it needed to add inspectors, there were no monies that came with that. As a

Transport committee  Thank you. With me today is Michael Teeter, who is my adviser. The Union of Canadian Transportation Employees is the national union representing most of the inspectors and employees at Transport Canada, the Canadian Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Board, the Canadian Tra

Transport committee  Yes.

Transport committee  I am not able to at this—

Transport committee  Wait a minute.

Transport committee  I think it's a result of not having direct and unannounced inspections.

Transport committee  The basis for saying that is that it's implemented as a replacement layer, not as an additional layer to the traditional.