Bill C-7 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Aeronautics Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts

Aeronautics Act

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I have to say at the outset that the greatest expertise in my caucus lies absolutely with the member for Burnaby—New Westminster. He has been very thorough in his study of this bill. He has followed it very closely. He has consulted widely. One of the things that concerns me a lot is that while the Liberal member who has just spoken has acknowledged there were many amendments needed and a number of amendments were adopted, it is very much the view of my colleague, who is the critic for this bill, that about 50% of the flaws, omissions or sins committed by this bill have been adopted. In other words, about 50% of the problems remain to be fixed.

I wonder if the member could elucidate for those of us who are trying to follow the debate here in the House but also for the public who share a real concern when we are talking about something as fundamental as air safety. Can he honestly say that fixing about 50% of the flaws in the bill is the kind of assurance that absolute air safety, of which we have a responsibility to assure the public, is reflected in this bill?

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I read through that huge list of organizations. I would have to say that if we have a committee that has been working for six months and has come to an agreement, especially with the chance of Parliament adjourning perhaps by June 20, there must be some form of compromise to move forward and get that large number of constituencies on board rather than lose all of that work. The committee has been six months in the process; it almost had it a year ago. I have to say that some may feel that the legislation is flawed.

Of course everybody in this House knows that Thunder Bay's airport is the third busiest in Ontario.

[An hon. member]

Of course.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you for understanding that fact. It is great geography.

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that when everybody's goal is primarily aviation safety and security, we really want to show some conclusion to the committee's work rather than risk losing it all and starting from scratch again in the fall. I would really encourage everyone in this House to support the bill.

Hoist motions are one thing. There is a historical precedent for why they are used, but now they are being used as a technique to slow things down and just be obstructionist. I think that in the spirit of compromise among all parties, getting these amendments through should be the goal of this Parliament.

[Larry Bagnell, Liberal, Yukon, YT]

Mr. Speaker, I have something I want to get on the record related to aeronautics, and this is the only spot where I know I can do it.

The Department of Transport is trying to force every airplane to have an upgraded ELT machine. I wish I had the number, but I was not expecting to debate this so quickly. This is fine for commercial airlines because they can afford it. The item will cost between $2,000 and $5,000, once it is inspected and integrated into the airplane. The problem is between 70% and 90% of the time it fails because the plane crashes and it gets wrecked. There are modern pieces of equipment, such as the GPS, which can be bought for a few hundred dollars. It will do the same job and in some ways a better one. I am talking about small private airplanes. Thousands of pilots in Canada are complaining about this. There was an agreement with the pilots association and then, for some reason, the government went back on that.

I ask the government to revisit this regulation because it will cause people to unnecessarily die. Pilots will ignore this because they cannot afford it, yet they could have had an alternative. I would ask the government to go back and negotiate with the pilots again and come up with something that is reasonable. Let the airlines have this fancy piece of machinery, which does not necessarily work all the time. However, for pilots of small aircraft let us keep them safe and let them use some of the alternatives that have come on stream since this was originally envisioned. It will make the skies safer and it will be a win-win situation for everyone.

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Yukon has made a statement, which is a reasonable one. From the standpoint of northwestern Ontario, I understand for the large number of smaller aircraft the concern is the expense. It is the kind of thing that committee should have on the record as addressing. In many cases in our society there is frequent over-compensation. In this modern era of technology, almost everyone in this room who has a BlackBerry can pretty much find out where they want to go or where they have been. Therefore, the technology need not be so expensive.

[Lloyd St. Amand, Liberal, Brant, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I very much enjoyed the speech of the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River. I have the opportunity to work with him on the natural resources committee and the agriculture committee. I know how effectively he performs on those two committees and how he keeps uppermost in his mind the concerns of his constituents.

He mentions, very eloquently, the ability of the House of Commons to work together. He took us very thoughtfully through the workings of the committee as it went through Bill C-7. He mentions that the overwhelming majority of groups, which are involved in this industry on a hour to hour basis, clearly are in favour of Bill C-7.

What are the member's constituents saying about the bill? How do they feel it will advance the issue of air safety, which is a concern to every Canadian?

[Ken Boshcoff, Liberal, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is very interesting that in northwestern Ontario, my riding of Thunder Bay—Rainy River, there are several small airline companies. There is the Thunder Bay International Airport Authority, which is the third busiest airport in Ontario. A number of very small private charter operations and a number of tourist camp operators have their own systems in concert with their tourist camp operations.

As someone who used to be in the insurance industry, not only do I know these operators personally, and they are far from shy people, they will always let me know if there is an issue of concern to them. In addition to the airport authority board, which is rather dynamic and forward thinking, in my meetings with the Canadian Airports Council, it has been pretty unanimous that everyone in these professional organizations and as independent business people have been very much in favour of something that strengthens safety for all passengers in Canada.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I know some members in the chamber have said how much they enjoyed the speech from the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River. I do not particularly want to single him out, but I am very nervous about his speech. I heard him say that we have been at this for a long time, that some amendments have been and we should now recognize that some compromises should be made and get the bill through.

I, for one, am not a nervous flyer at all. I am quite relaxed flying, but there are a lot of reasons to be nervous, particularly if one is inclined to be a nervous flyer and sees us sailing through a bill that is based on compromises. Surely there is nothing less appropriate to compromise over than airline safety.

This is one of the areas in which it is pretty absolute, that if there are any doubts or any possibilities that safety considerations are being compromised, then we should stick with the project, keep working at it until, as my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster has said, we absolutely get rid of the flaws in the bill and we can assure the public that no compromises have taken place with respect to it. It is very hard to imagine one would rationalize to members of the public, whether they are frequent flyers, or are occasional flyers or do not fly at all, because I am sure they have loved ones who fly, that we have decided to make some compromises in order to say that we have something to show for it.

I know the member, as have others, said that a good many of the amendments brought forward were adopted and the majority of those who appeared before the committee were satisfied with the amendments. However, as I look back at some of the testimony before the committee, I am very worried about the fact that some of those who clearly were not satisfied, those who remain very concerned and very critical of some of the fundamental aspects of the bill appear to be those who would be the most knowledgeable. I think it is fair to say that those who do not have a self-interest involved, but rather who have a particular technical and professional expertise makes them in some ways the most informed and the most reliable critics. They are the ones to whom we ought to pay the most attention.

There is no question that this is very complicated legislation. Therefore, I do not pose as somebody who has suddenly become an expert because it would not be true. What I do have is a very great concern about what appears to be the most fundamental principles that need to be upheld. We do not simply pass over, essentially to the airlines, the ability to enforce their own safety requirements.

The simplistic way of putting this is the notion of the fox looking after the hen house. I know some will object and say that there are some checks and balances. However, it does seem as though it is really a concern, that we essentially are putting in place a system that depends on the airlines being their own safety management enforcers. That is fundamentally wrong, and not because all would act responsibly. I think we would agree that the overwhelming majority of airlines would act absolutely responsibly. Thank goodness we can say that about the vast majority. However, there are also known situations where particular airlines have acted very irresponsibly, have disregarded the need for the most basic safety requirements. Therefore, we need to be sure that we have a fail proof system that attends to those who will be least responsible.

I have reviewed some of the concerns that have been brought forward. It seems to me that we are playing somewhat fast and loose with what is ultimately our responsibility as legislators. We have to ensure we put an airline system in place that is tight enough and based on the important principle that self-interest cannot be allowed to interfere with fundamental safety requirements, and not a system that will work for the vast majority. We have to ensure a system of checks and balances is in place that will never make the mistake of putting self-management into the hands of an irresponsible airline.

It is really a concern when I hear members talk about compromising in order to have something to show for what has been a year's work. What could be more serious than placing the fundamental issue of safety in the hands of those of us who are not experts, those of us who are not professionals in the field? The fundamental issue of safety should be placed in the hands of the most appropriate structure and the most appropriate system. A number of those who expressed real reservations about that are the very people who have the most expertise in the field. This is indeed a worry.

It is not clear to me, from having followed some of the debate here and having reviewed some of the Hansard transcript, whether official opposition members will stand and vote, for once, on something as important as this. Some members may vote for the bill and some may vote against it. I have heard people speaking on both sides of this issue.

It is not surprising to me that a number of members on the official opposition bench, if we can still call the Liberals in the House the official opposition, have indicated that they will be voting for the legislation. If I recall correctly, the bill was brought in by the Liberals in the first place and we find ourselves still working through it to try to arrive at a higher standard of safety enforcement.

Once we get the kind of references to the need to compromise and some indication it looks like there will be Liberals voting on both sides of this, some really important work still needs to be done to get this thing right.

I am persuaded that some of the most important principles about assuring the checks and balances are in place and that it is not just the airline industry policing itself have yet to be really properly grounded, if I can use that in the context of what we are talking about, which is airline travel.

I do not get to ask questions on this for the member who has advocated compromise. I do not want to seem like I am singling him out, but when we are talking in terms of compromise, it is frightening to imagine that we could be rationalizing our way to voting for the bill in its current form.

Enough concerns have not been addressed in terms of the amendments. W e have to be very mindful of what some of those concerns were. Who would better know what the hazards are in the current bill than Justice Virgil Moshansky, who conducted the Dryden crash inquiry and who expressed some major concerns about the bill in its current form. Who would know more than those who have themselves served as inspectors about the remaining flaws in the bill now before us?

My time is up, but I want to say finally, one more time for the record, that there is no room for compromise on something as fundamental as airline safety. Therefore, this bill in its current form is not supportable from my perspective and that of my NDP colleagues.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Halifax spoke eloquently, as she always does, on this issue of compromising passenger safety, which is really the intent of the bill, essentially.

Because Transport Canada wants to cut back on the number of flight inspectors it has, it came up with this brilliant scheme that it simply will give the safety management systems to the airlines themselves, which, as the member for Halifax noted, works very well in the case of a number of airlines but will not work so well with some of the fly-by-night airlines that exist in Canada, which have had problems in the past. Without appropriate oversight, it is a very real compromise for passenger safety.

I want to ask the member for Halifax this question. Given the fact that she travels every week to her riding in Nova Scotia, has travelled across this country as a former leader of my party and continues to do so today as a member of Parliament, and since she meets thousands of people in her own riding and elsewhere throughout Nova Scotia and across Canada, what does she think the reaction of members of the Canadian public would be to find out that Parliament has adopted legislation that compromises their safety when they fly on certain airlines?

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I suppose all of us as members of Parliament do not want to scare the wits out of the travelling public, but it does come up from time to time. One tries to raise the issues where one thinks there is some expertise to lend to addressing the legislation in its current form and certainly to what we have identified as flaws.

The fundamental question remains. How many Canadians would vote to have an airline that has a record of repeated safety violations made responsible for its own safety management system? That is the question.

I said earlier that I am not a nervous flyer. I actually have a great deal of confidence. For example, I travel most of the time with Air Canada and I have never on a single occasion had a concern about whether my safety was assured or not.

However, we know there are such airlines. Some of them get into the business and get out of the business. Unfortunately, the one that most easily comes to mind is Jetsgo, which has had a really serious record of concerns about playing fast and loose with safety.

I do not think that one has to be the kind of expert who gave testimony in order to express real concerns. If there is any question about there being some airlines that would not operate in a totally safe manner and that would use the fact the safety management systems are put back in their hands, one just needs the common sense to say that this piece of legislation is not adequate to absolutely guarantee safety. That is why we have to keep working at it.

There is nothing about the deadline that people are suggesting which means that all the work is for naught. It means we have to go forward with the amendments that have already been made, but we still have to address those that have not been adequately adopted.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Halifax referenced Jetsgo. I want to read into the record the problems of Jetsgo:

Three months after the launch of the discount airline, sloppy maintenance forced an emergency landing in Toronto. Pilots noticed they were losing the hydraulic fluid that helps run aircraft systems...Mechanics had installed a temporary hydraulic line with the wrong pressure rating, and it failed within two flights.

There are a lot of articles on Jetsgo. Could the member for Halifax comment on the well-documented safety problems of Jetsgo and what it could mean for Bill C-7 and the safety of the travelling public if the airlines are responsible for their own safety?

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The hon. member for Halifax has 30 seconds.

[Alexa McDonough, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have a lot of time to respond, but it does not take long to respond to that. Jetsgo is an example of why it is just simply wrong-headed to suggest that the major responsibility for the safety management systems can lie with the airlines themselves. If we have even one irresponsible airline operating, then there is reason to be concerned and, frankly, reason to be critical of this legislation at this point in its current but hopefully not final form.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to rise on Bill C-7, the unsafe skies act, because I think it is important that Canadians are aware of what is actually in this bill that is being proposed by the Conservatives and that was proposed by the previous Liberal government as well.

Essentially, this bill would do for the airline industry what we saw done for the railway industry and for business aircraft. I will come back to that in a moment. What it does is hand over, through self-serve safety, SMS, the safety management systems of airlines, to the airlines themselves, to the corporate CEOs.

Why would this be proposed by the government? People who came before the transport committee, the chief bureaucrats at Transport Canada, were very clear that over the past few years we have seen a substantial increase in the number of flights in Canada. There is no doubt about that. There has been a steady and substantial increase from one year to the next in the number of flights in Canada.

What have Conservative and Liberal governments done? While they were handing out tens of billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts, they decided that they could cut back on the number of safety inspectors.

According to testimony at the transport committee just a couple of weeks ago, it turns out now that through attrition we have lost a couple of hundred flight inspectors. We are not even at the full strength we were at 10 years ago. We are now down to less than 750 flight inspectors for the entire country.

Let us picture this. We have an escalating number of flights over Canadian skies and a smaller number of people to protect the public interest. What is the brilliant plan? Let us hand over safety management systems to the airlines themselves.

As the member for Halifax said, with some airlines I do not think any of us would have any concerns at all. We have some very well run airlines in Canada. However, not all of them are well run.

And here is the problem with the unsafe skies act. Essentially what it would do is hand over safety management. Whether the airline is an Air Canada or a Jetsgo, it would simply take care of safety itself.

That is simply not acceptable to the vast majority of Canadians, who want to make sure when they put their loved ones on an aircraft that the aircraft is certified as safe and is overseen by registered flight inspectors through the Government of Canada with the tax dollars that Canadians pay to ensure the safety of the travelling public.

We have seen this story before. We saw the same kind of thing happen with railway safety. The government said that we did really did not need to have all those railway inspectors. It said that we should just hand over inspection to the railway companies themselves. What happened? There was an escalating derailment rate, with deaths across the country. Unfortunately, British Columbia in particular is a victim of that wrong-headed and irresponsible policy of self-serve safety in the railway industry.

We are dealing with that legacy today as we see more and more derailments. There are higher rates now than there were before this handover.

We saw the first implementation of SMS with business aircraft. With business aircraft, we had a perfect record. For over more than a decade under the previous system, with flight inspectors in place, business aircraft in Canada were perfectly safe. When I say “perfectly safe”, it essentially means that with business aircraft there were no accidents. There were no fatalities.

We turned over business aircraft to SMS and we have seen the first fatalities. Thus, through this wrong-headed--and let us call it what it is--budget-cutting measure, we have turned a perfect system into a situation where people now are dying, where people are victims.

It did not work for railways. It has not worked for business aircraft. Why would any member of Parliament in his or her right mind vote for a bill that is not going to help or enhance the safety of the travelling public but would essentially do the opposite?

I think it is fair to say that in this corner of the House the NDP has been saying since this bill first came forward that there were problems with it. We tried to fix it in committee. We got a number of amendments through.

Then the government and the Liberals worked together and basically steamrolled the bill through, badly flawed, as the member for Halifax said, with huge gaps that will have a result and an impact on the travelling public.

We do not have to look far. If it did not work for railways, has not worked for business aircraft, then we would think, rather than going for the three strikes and playing some sort of strange dice game with the lives of the Canadian travelling public, that the Conservatives would say that there is a problem here.

The government should say that it is going to have to withdraw this bill and actually look at it and see what the impacts are of cutting back on flight inspectors, handing over safety management to airlines, good or bad, and perhaps most particularly, ensuring both increased secrecy around safety problems that occur in the airline industry and also a get out of jail free card for corporate CEOs. They could violate the law, but they have a confidential reporting system that basically gets them around what essentially should be a safety system that protects Canadians.

These are the fundamental problems with the bill. It has not worked in the two sectors it has been implemented in. This is a big problem.

The Auditor General's report did not analyze the actual impact on safety. All she did was analyze how the paperwork was being handled by Transport Canada. The report that came out a few weeks ago was very harsh in condemning Transport Canada for not getting the paperwork right.

I am not concerned about the paperwork. When the Auditor General says that there are fundamental problems and flaws with the bill, I think the government should sit up and take notice. Members of Parliament should sit up and take notice.

But when the Auditor General says the paperwork has not even been done right, then we have to wonder about the impact with the implementation of this bill. If the government cannot get the paperwork right, we can be darn sure that it is not going to get the safety systems right.

The NDP initially was the spokesperson for the Canadian travelling public. I know now that there are members of the Bloc and the Liberal Party who are now questioning this whole issue and are concerned about it as more and more voices speak up against it, Judge Moshansky being one of them. There are the flight inspectors across this country who are concerned about the impact on safety. I could mention many more.

Fortunately, the fact that the NDP has been speaking up has led to other voices being brought forward. That is why we are opposing this bill.