Mr. Chair, I can assure the committee that Transport Canada provides oversight and does oversight over the industry. The industry is not self-regulated; Transport Canada is the regulatory authority.
Some of the changes we made in moving to safety management systems were basically to make sure that we had a more proactive, robust industry that put in place systems that would identify risks before they became incidents. Our role is one of assessing whether those systems meet our Canadian regulations.
As well, we not only assess the systems of the operators; we also undertake inspections. We do what we call “program validation inspections”, which are broad and comprehensive inspections in which we have a multidisciplinary team of inspectors. We also do process inspections and we do sampling, so we still do regulate.