Transport committee  At an airport that has over 150,000 movements, they could have one truck. That would be one truck, one individual, for firefighting. They wouldn't have the training for structural firefighting. My understanding is that in Canada, we have that capability at the Edmonton airport and I think at Pearson also.

Transport committee  As I said, in the earlier time, we went out to the actual airports, to engineers and such, to get technical experience from the industry. Today, we are moving away from that. Funnily enough, with our inspectors today, we have gone through two or three versions of new inspection procedures and our inspectors are not trained on those new procedures—for the last three....

Transport committee  It's really left to the inspectors to interpret the new changes without being trained in them. There is no standardization across Canada of training. Every region has its own way of doing it. The only standard training is delegation, which is roughly every five years. We have a word for it.

Transport committee  I'm sorry, can you just ask the question one more time?

Transport committee  What we say to this is that the reliance on SMS is a portion of it. It's a portion of regulation, but it is not a stand-alone system. Many places in the federal sector that are using SMS are not actually compliant or need to be SMS compliant. The problem that Transport Canada has at the moment is that they are treating everything they're overseeing as SMS-compliant.

Transport committee  To understand the difference between Canada and the U.S., our emergency response is to get product to a location on a runway and to create an egress, or an escape route, and to protect the escape route. The responsibility in Canada for the removal of passengers, or any toxics or any fire in an aircraft, is the responsibility of the flight attendant.

Transport committee  If we look in the dangerous goods inspectors, that role has gone down from different modes of travel, be it rail or civil aviation, into one mode that will do everything. As I specified, someone coming into Transport Canada before as an inspector would bring lots of years of experience in the sector from private industry.

Transport committee  In Canada, it's actually the amount of product to a spot on a runway, as opposed to actual firefighters. In the crash of Air France, I think it was, at Toronto airport, they were actually running at 17 firefighters, which was the American standard. In Canada that would have been three trucks.

Transport committee  Thank you very much. With regard to the Transportation Safety Board, we've noted our concerns about the operations of the TSB on a number of occasions, but these bear repeating because if we do not learn from our accidents and mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them. Our greatest concern remains the length of time it takes TSB recommendations to be implemented.

Transport committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to present the views of our members on aviation safety. The Union of Canadian Transportation Employees is the national union for most employees at Transport Canada, the Transportation Safety Board, the Canadian Transportation Agency, and many of Canada's airports.

Transport committee  I'm David Clark, the regional vice-president Pacific of the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees.