Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for inviting me.
As we have spent a year and a half studying offshore helicopter safety on the inquiry--and of course, response times are important in that--I felt that it may be helpful to your committee and to this group if you were able to ask questions of me, and that it could be helpful in the decisions and the recommendations that you will make in due course to your colleagues in the House of Commons.
With me today, as you've said, Mr. Chairman, is Ms. Anne Fagan. She is one of the inquiry counsel. The other, Mr. John Roil, is not able to be here today.
Ms. Carla Foote is also here. She is the person who has guided us in the last year and a half in our relations with the media.
Very briefly, everyone, I suppose, knows of the Atlantic Accord. That's when the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and the Government of Canada, about 26 or 27 years ago, agreed that the offshore would be jointly managed. To jointly manage it, they have set up a board called the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, usually referred to as C-NLOPB, which is a mouthful until you get used to saying it.
When there is a serious accident or incident in the offshore, that board is required under the legislation to call and have a public inquiry. That inquiry was set up shortly after the crash in March 2009, which killed 17 people in our offshore.
There are many facets to the inquiry itself, because it deals with offshore matters and safety generally, but it is largely focused on helicopter transport, which is most practical and really much more convenient, of course, for everyone concerned. It's not exclusively the only way you can get people back and forth, but ship transport or boat transport, when you're talking about hundreds of kilometres, is both slow and rough going in our ocean.
There are a couple of things I should bring to your attention at the outset. One is that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada is examining that accident from the technical point of view--from the point of view of what actually caused the accident and the various related factors--but they're also entitled to comment on things like life-saving methods and the suits that people wear if they should be immersed in water if a helicopter goes down. On a lot of things there is some overlap. I, of course, was not able--nor did I wish to, nor did I have the staff--to look at anything that is within the principal role of the Transportation Safety Board.
They're going to report eight days from today, and that report will be very interesting.
I have completed phase one. Phase two will be an examination of the Transportation Safety Board's findings to see if there are any additional recommendations or observations that I may wish to make to, say, C-NLOPB.
So I can't deal with or touch anything to do with the Transportation Safety Board's primary role. The other limitation is that I can't advise and I couldn't look into what the Department of National Defence does--not so much what it does, but where it stations its equipment and how it is organized. This is for the simple reason that when the Atlantic Accord was signed and the enabling legislation passed, there was nothing delegated to the board that would impact on the Department of National Defence and its search and rescue modes and what it does. That was outside my terms of reference, but I do want to make one point, and I'm glad of the opportunity to make it publicly. Although I couldn't inquire into what DND does in search and rescue, I found DND to be one of the most helpful entities that interacted with the commission.
We had a senior officer, Colonel Drover, come from Ottawa to explain the role of DND. Later in the year--this past summer--DND took me and two counsel on a daylight practice mission and on a nighttime mission. That was very valuable to the three of us, and to me especially, in learning how search and rescue actually works, rather than reading about it or being told about it.
It was one of the best days, actually, in the whole of the work of the commission, and as a Canadian citizen I want to say how proud I am of these people, who take daily risks without fuss and furor when they are engaged in rescues. I do want to make that point.
To come back to the inquiry, search and rescue arose really as a formal issue after the tragedy of the Ocean Ranger, and that's nearly 27 years ago now. There was a five-person commission set up. I have one of the recommendations here in front of me and I will read it to you if I can find it—