Mr. Chair, and honourable members, I want to 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 has been with us since our inception in 1990. He possesses a deep understanding of our mandate and the processes we follow.
Luc Casault is our director general of corporate services. He is well placed to provide greater context and information about the financial and corporate details of our work.
For those members of the committee who may be unfamiliar with the Transportation Safety Board, I'd like to start with a very brief overview of who we are and what we do.
Our agency 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, marine, rail, and pipeline modes of transportation. We do that by conducting independent investigations, identifying safety deficiencies, causes, and contributing factors, making recommendations, and reporting publicly on our investigations and their findings.
We do not attribute blame or civil or criminal liability.
Put simply, when something goes wrong, we investigate not only what happened but why it happened. Then we make public what we've learned so that those best placed to take action—meaning the regulators in the industry—can do so.
The main reason for our presence before this committee today is straightforward. We're asking for additional funds to cover a shortfall in our salary budget for the current fiscal year. Following the implementation of recent collective agreements for public servants, the TSB has had to absorb much of the costs for both current salary increases and retroactive salary payments. While we were diligent in setting aside funds over the last two years to cover those costs, the final agreed-upon salary increases were nonetheless higher than anticipated. The amount we are requesting is $1.8 million. Broken down, that's approximately $1.5 million for salaries and $300,000 for statutory contributions to employee benefit plans.
Second, our departmental results report was recently tabled, and we'd be pleased to take this opportunity to discuss our results with the committee. Last year was a particularly busy one for the Transportation Safety Board. For instance, we published 44 investigation reports and issued a total of 20 recommendations in the marine, rail, and aviation sectors.
We hosted an inaugural transportation safety summit that brought together senior Canadian transportation executives from government and the transportation industry, along with some of their labour organizations.
We completed an in-depth safety study on expanding the use of locomotive voice and video recorders in Canada.
On top of that, we launched a new edition of our safety watchlist, which identifies the key safety issues that need to be addressed to make Canada's transportation system even safer.
Senior management, meanwhile, has undertaken a number of efforts to improve the way we go about our business. For example, we implemented a more structured and robust project management process aimed at improving investigation timeliness, along with enhanced measures for tracking the progress of investigations. We're also placing a greater emphasis on teamwork, and the scoping and assignment of investigation tasks is now done in a manner that better leverages all personnel across the country.
We also continued to increase the amount of information that we proactively publish on our website.
While the TSB is a small organization, which can somewhat limit our flexibility, we have a strong track record when it comes to adapting to change and getting things done, so we thank you for asking us to be here today and we'll be pleased to take your questions in due course.
Thank you.