Government Operations Committee on Feb. 24th, 2026

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I must say I was impressed with your online strategic plan. I went to look at it, and I was captured by the opening paragraph, which says, “The phone rings in the middle of the night. There's been an accident, and somewhere in Canada, employees of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) get to work.” It goes on to say that you try to answer three questions, as you said: “What happened? Why? What needs to be done to prevent it from happening again?" Then it says, “Canadians everywhere can be assured that our organization is strong enough and flexible enough to meet the challenges of the future.”

Overall, I understand that this is a five-year plan in its last year. Will you be renewing your strategic plan?

[Yoan Marier]

Yes. We're working on that right now. We should be able to make it public in the next few weeks. We are actively working on having a new strategic plan that will identify new issues we can work on to continue improving.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

We look forward to that.

Just to follow up on a question from my colleague, in your work, have there ever been any instances where you've been held back from carrying out your mandate in any way?

[Yoan Marier]

The vast majority of the time, we have no problems. Are you referring mostly to fieldwork and how things are working in the field when we interact as we do an investigation?

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

It is broader than that. Some would say government intervention, in other words.

[Yoan Marier]

No, not at all.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Not at all....

[Yoan Marier]

We are independent. I've been chair for a year and a half, and I can say that we have absolutely never had any sort of political pressure. We were always able to fulfill our mandate without interference.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

I have a final question, then, with respect to the act.

The act dates back to 1994: the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act. In your strategic plan, you said that you had plans to provide comments with respect to the need to update the act. In general, what are some of your thoughts and what are your plans moving forward on that?

[Yoan Marier]

We have identified a few areas in our act that could benefit from modernization. As you mentioned, the act is quite old. It was updated a long time ago. We have flagged these potential improvements to our act with our minister's office for consideration. We feel that some things can be improved to provide better tools for investigators and to give legal protection for board members. These are examples of things we are looking at.

[Pauline Rochefort, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

For me, it was new to discover the Transportation Safety Board. I'm delighted by their work and to learn more about it. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you.

We'll go to Mrs. Block for four minutes and then Ms. Khalid for four.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much, Chair. I'll be following up on some of the questions previously asked.

In 2023, there was a draft report leaked from the International Civil Aviation Organization that found multiple lapses in Transport Canada's aviation safety policies. In the audit, as you mentioned, the Transportation Safety Board scored an 83%.

However, on aircraft operations, Canada scored just 23% and 67% in personnel training and licensing. What do these numbers say about the state of Transport Canada and the well-being of Canadians when we are provided shockingly terrifying figures like that?

[Yoan Marier]

For our part, we took part in the part of the audit that was about the TSB. We were not involved in the other parts of the audit. I'm not aware of how things unfolded when the ICAO inspectors went to Transport Canada. I can't really comment on that.

I know for certain that Transport Canada has a number of action items they are following up on to try to fix the issues that were identified as part of this audit.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you.

Among the findings they found to be unsatisfactory was that Transport Canada does not properly monitor aviation companies' fatigue management systems, which are rules that dictate pilots' required rest periods. Have you raised this as an issue as the Transportation Safety Board?

[Yoan Marier]

Fatigue has been an issue on our watch list for a long time. We have a number of recommendations related to fatigue. It is a multimodal issue, which means that it's not only for air. It's also for marine and rail. It's definitely been on our radar for a while, still is and probably will be for the near future.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Other issues they found were that Transport Canada allows holders of foreign private pilot licences to convert them to Canadian permits without verifying the licence with the foreign authority.

Also, Transport Canada has no formal way of ensuring air traffic control or Nav Canada continually assesses the shortage of staff and the capacity to handle aircraft. As well, pilots and mechanics can obtain medical clearance from foreign doctors, who are not subject to Canadian assessments.

Have you found issues similar to the ones that ICAO found, and has the government taken any action on them?

[Yoan Marier]

Off the top of my head, I don't recall investigations in which these issues were raised.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We'll go to Ms. Khalid, please.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I'll start by asking about quality and efficiency. Are you, as an organization, leveraging new technologies such as artificial intelligence in how you operate, specifically with respect to quality and delivery of service and efficiency?

[Yoan Marier]

Finding efficiencies is definitely something that we're working hard on at the moment. With specific regard to AI, we are currently in the evaluation phase. We are looking at opportunities to use AI.

Right now, in the short term, we're looking at targeted uses. Translation is an example. Using it to produce report summaries can also be a potential option. As for other uses, it would probably be sometime down the road when we're able to use it more extensively.

The processes we have internally are already.... It's a well-oiled machine. We have a very good methodology that we use to conduct our investigations. It works well, so we just need to continue providing our investigators with the tools they need to do their jobs.

Recently, we created a new safety analysis tool, which is a tool that our investigators can use to analyze an occurrence in order to identify the findings of that occurrence. It's a new tool that makes the analysis more solid and makes the data about occurrences easily accessible in one place. It's an example of modernization that we did recently. We're continually looking for opportunities to do things better.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I appreciate that. I'd love to learn a little more about how that safety analysis tool impacts your bottom line.

Budget 2025 requires you to reduce your spending by $4.4 million, if I'm correct. How do you plan on reducing those costs in terms of your operations?

I want to know more about how tools like the safety analysis tool impact your bottom line.

[James Clarkin]

I'll just give a clarification. We're reducing by $1.4 million by 2028-29.

[Yoan Marier]

As James mentioned earlier, we are looking at various ways that we can gain some efficiencies in how to streamline our work. We want to improve our timelines for report publication, because some reports, as you know, can take a lot of time to be published, so we have to remove bottlenecks. We also have to find ways to streamline the work by providing our people with additional tools. Obviously, the budget reductions we are faced with are another opportunity for us to work hard on finding those efficiencies for our people.