Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to appear today.
I bring with me two colleagues who offer a wealth of experience. Mr. Jean Laporte is our chief operating officer. He's been with us since our inception in 1990 and possesses a deep understanding of our mandate and the processes we follow. Madam Chantal Lemyre is our director general of corporate services and chief financial officer. She is well placed to provide greater context and information about the financial and corporate details of our work.
I'd like to take just a moment to tell you about who we are and what we do. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada, or TSB, was created in 1990 by the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act. Our mandate and our sole purpose is to advance transportation safety in the air, rail, marine, and pipeline modes of transportation that are under federal jurisdiction. We do this by conducting independent investigations, identifying safety deficiencies, analyzing causes and contributing factors, making recommendations, and publishing our reports. Put simply, when something goes wrong, we investigate to find out not just what happened, but why. Then we make public what we've learned so that those best placed to take action—industry and regulators—can do so.
It's also important to clarify what the TSB does not do. We are neither regulator nor tribunal. We do not assign fault, nor do we determine civil or criminal liability. We do not conduct investigations or audits. Those functions are left to the regulators and other organizations. Instead, we're independent, operating at arm's length from other government departments and agencies. This lets us be impartial, free from any real or perceived external influence. As such, we do not report to Transport Canada or to the Minister of Transport, but rather directly to Parliament through the leader of the government in the House of Commons.
That is why the TSB falls under this committee's mandate as regards its main estimates and its report on plans and priorities.
This past March, we completed our 25th year of advancing safety across Canada. That's thousands of investigations and countless lessons learned. A lot has changed over that time.
The world has become increasingly connected, new technologies and new tools have emerged, and the demand for information is more pressing than ever.
Last year, for example, we received notification of approximately 3,700 transportation occurrences from coast to coast to coast. We opened 41 new investigations, and we received over 1,400 requests for information from the media—reporters, editors, TV producers—and as you can imagine, they all want to know everything right away.
To deal with all of this change and the evolving expectations of Canadians, we've developed a new five-year strategic plan. This plan places a priority on modernizing much of the way we work—our processes, our tools, our training and our products, even the way we communicate—while continuing to deliver on our day-to-day mandate. But there are challenges and risks ahead. Chief among them is the need to constantly balance our workload against available resources. That's because successive budgetary freezes and cuts, as well as the implementation of new government-wide systems and initiatives, have had a cumulative impact that has reduced our flexibility.
Put another way, we're a small organization whose management team works hard to ensure good planning and oversight on an ongoing basis so that we can deliver on our mandate as efficiently as possible with limited resources. That really is the ultimate bottom line, because there's not a single person in this country whose life is not impacted by transportation safety. No matter where things go wrong—on our waterways, along our pipelines, on our railways, or in the skies—Canadians need to have confidence that we will find the answers.
They have to know that, even if things are changing and we have to adapt to new realities, we can continue our work without compromise in order to make Canada's transportation network as safe as possible.
Again, in closing, thank you for inviting us to be here today.
We're happy to answer any questions you may have. Merci.