Good morning.
Mr. Chair, honourable members, thank you for inviting the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to appear today.
I have two colleagues with me. Monsieur Jean Laporte is our Chief Operating Officer.
I am also accompanied by Luc Cassault, our Director General and Chief Financial Officer.
Given that the TSB appeared before this committee in November 2017, I believe that members of the committee are familiar with the TSB and its mandate. I will therefore proceed directly to the reason of our presence before this committee today — that is the 2018-19 Main Estimates and the 2018-19 Departmental Plan.
The 2018-19 main estimates show TSB appropriations of approximately $27 million and statutory contributions to employee benefits of $3 million, for a total of about $30.2 million. Compared with the previous year's main estimates, the TSB's authorities increased by about $800,000 due to adjustments for salary increases as per the collective agreements and the associated amounts for contributions to employee benefit plans.
Before moving to the departmental plan, please allow me to share a few performance highlights for the fiscal year we have just completed. I am pleased to inform you that we have made significant progress on the backlog of old investigations and we are now just about caught up. In 2017-18 we published an increased number of investigation reports compared with the previous two years while also improving the overall timeliness of our reports. Significant progress was also made on the implementation of our safety recommendations. Overall, although our performance targets were not fully achieved, clear and measurable progress was made in a number of areas. More details on our performance results will be tabled in our annual report to Parliament in June as well as our departmental results report.
Building upon the work accomplished over the past year, our 2018-19 Departmental Plan lays out our plans and priorities for the year ahead.
I would like to highlight just a few key items.
In a few weeks, we will proceed with the implementation of a number of concrete changes aimed at modernizing the way we conduct our business in light of changing expectations of Canadians. We will be rolling out a suite of new policies, revised business processes, and updated products. For instance, our new policy on occurrence classification will help us better prioritize, track, and report on transportation occurrences. For simpler and smaller occurrences, we will produce a new, short, limited-scope, factual-only report that will enable us to share safety information faster and more effectively. We will also launch a new, more user-friendly website, fully compliant with the latest Government of Canada standards, fully accessible from mobile devices, and including expanded contents.
We believe that these changes will help us make further progress towards the achievement of our performance targets. However, we won't stop there. We plan to continue our modernization initiatives, while also improving our interaction with indigenous peoples, and sustaining our efforts to provide our employees with a positive work environment.
Once again, we have an ambitious agenda, but we have a strong track record when it comes to adapting to change and getting things done.
Again, thank you for inviting us to be here today. We'd be happy to take your questions.