Transport committee  Again, the Auditor General has done an extensive review of the implementation of safety management systems and Transport Canada's oversight of SMS in railways. I'd like to add that every safety management system must have certain basic principles. They are specified in slightly

Transport committee  I would just say that there's a need for ongoing risk analysis of ongoing day-to-day operations, and there's certainly a need when operations change. For example, changes in the carriage of dangerous goods should trigger an SMS-type risk analysis. Changes in routes, changes in go

Transport committee  We haven't done a cross-modal comparison or cross-company comparison of safety management systems. Certainly in each of our investigations we look at how companies are managing safety and we identify areas of risk.

Transport committee  As I started to indicate earlier, some companies may—and I'm not talking about any one company, but just in general—take a very bureaucratic approach to safety management systems, assuming that the documents are just a manual; whereas in true safety management, the best principle

Transport committee  Absolutely. We'll never know the accidents we didn't have because of safety management systems, so sometimes it's hard to measure the effect over a short period of time, but over a longer period of time, we would expect to see the risk in the system go down, and that should trans

Transport committee  The first thing is to really look at how companies have implemented SMS. Unfortunately, some companies may see it as a manual and not a pervasive process that has to take place throughout the company, which has people in a constant mindset of looking for things that can go wrong.

Transport committee  Safety management systems are extremely important to a transportation mode, an organization, to help identify and manage risk. That being said, they don't take away the need for very strong oversight, and that oversight can vary from strict inspections, to confirmed compliance, t