Transport Committee on June 15th, 2006

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for coming today.

We had the Transportation Safety Board here at the last meeting. At several of our meetings, the topic of flight attendants has come up. I want to confirm what I think I heard here today.

Is there any scientific evidence that decreasing the trained cabin staff would significantly impact the aviation safety levels--like in the Air France incident?

[Marc Grégoire]

Well, let's talk about Air France. In the Air France accident in Toronto last summer there were 10 flight attendants, seven of which were qualified specifically for that aircraft, two of which were qualified flight attendants but not specifically for that aircraft, and one of which was a student.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Which would actually be an increase from what our current--

[Marc Grégoire]

Yes.

Flight attendants play a fundamental role for safety on the aircraft, especially in case of an accident, and they play their role very well. There's no evidence, to my knowledge, that having 10, 20, or 30 flight attendants will help to evacuate the aircraft. In that case it was an Airbus A340, and to evacuate the aircraft, le pays, la France had determined that for this aircraft you needed six flight attendants, but there were more.

In Canada today for an Airbus A340 carrying the same number of passengers, you would need eight flight attendants under the 1 in 40 rule. If we were to move ahead with the 1 in 50 rule, and if the airline was to choose that, because they would have to choose between one or the other, not by aircraft, not by flight, but for the whole fleet, if they chose to go there, you would still have eight. Our proposed 1 in 50 rule is not only the number of seats divided by 50, but it's also accompanied by a number of mitigating factors. For big airliners like the Airbus A340, one is to have a flight attendant for each emergency exit door. On this aircraft there were 297 passengers. So if you just take the pure ratio of 1 in 50, you would get six, which is the rule in France, by the way, and in a large number of countries. All European countries, the U.S., most Asian countries, to my knowledge as well, Japan, Singapore, China, and Korea are all under the 1 in 50 today. You would have had six. With our proposal, you would have eight flight attendants.

So this rule, depending on which way the company chooses to go, may in fact on some occasions bring more flight attendants into their fleet than what they have today. On some other occasions you may see a very slight reduction, but the slight reduction does not meet the reduction in safety at all.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Excellent. Thank you.

The other thing I want to talk about is safety management systems. Do we see the potential for better results in the safety management systems throughout the different sectors of transport?

[Marc Grégoire]

Absolutely. We're convinced of that. We are a leader in the world on this subject. We have been talking to international forums about this. On aviation, for instance, we spent a lot of time at ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization.

We are convinced that we have to go this route, and I will go back to Mr. Carrier's question. Why? Because it's going into the human element, and the goal is to bring safety to the centre of the preoccupations of a company. So what we want the CEO to do is to care about safety as much as about the bottom line.

You don't have to believe us. I would suggest you ask Air Transat; ask CHC Helicopter Corporation to come here and explain what the perspective was. How much did they gain? How much money are they saving today--Air Transat, for example, after having implemented SMS? How much has it improved the relationship between the employees and the employer, the atmosphere, the communications? Their testimony is probably more valid than ours as the regulator, and they have improved their safety record. They have fewer incidents.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you, Mr. Storseth.

Mr. Julian.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. You got to me a little earlier than I expected, but I appreciate you rescheduling the intervenors.

Thank you for coming here today. Although I missed your presentation, I did read it. I'll start with the issue that you raised actually in your presentation. You said that we all know that quality risk management is based on quality information. You said that information must be free flowing and the reporting system must encourage and accommodate both the proactive reporting of hazards and the negative reporting of incidents and accidents.

Now, we have Bill C-6 coming forward that actually would subscribe...from the Access to Information Act a lot of the reporting that currently one might be able to access. We've also had the issue around the civil aviation data reporting system and the fact that this is not accessible to people who used to be able to access that information.

My first question is, how does that jive with...? We're having more restrictions on the free flow of information, particularly around accidents or near accidents, and very clearly, you've made a statement that I agree with, that we have to have the proactive reporting of hazards. We must have quality information, and the public absolutely has a right to know when there are safety issues.

[Merlin Preuss, Director General, Civil Aviation, Department of Transport]

Mr. Julian, I think it's a very good question, and it comes up repeatedly. If you're to make a safety management system work, if you're to be able to find out what's going on in a particular operation, you need, as Marc has said and you've repeated, to have a free flow of information.

Frankly, one of the reasons why we need to provide some protection is that the first pass of this information has a lot to do with the associations that represent pilots and flight attendants, and they would very much like some protection from retribution. If there's any hint there's going to be retribution as a result of some report, then, fundamentally, the report will dry up. You won't get that information. Neither the government nor the company, nor for that matter the associations, will get that information. So we are asking for protections to be put in place for that purpose, to actually promote that free flow of information.

Now to the question of the public's right to know. I believe they do have the right to know and they will have access to that information, but only after it's met the privacy concerns. In other words, if I were to make a report and for some reason I'm culpable for something, and the company is going to take care of business, and the government knows how the company is going to take care of business, then the information that's about me should stay to the side, so that I will be encouraged to provide that information on an ongoing basis, and so will my confrères and my co-workers.

Once all that process is done, with the name removed, if you wish, all this information is available, and we'll be there to demand it on site with the people involved. But as far as the public goes, those things are reportable after the fact.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

I'll give you a specific example. I'm sure you're familiar with the Toronto Star, Hamilton Spectator, Kitchener-Waterloo Record series on air safety issues. One of the things they pointed out only a few days ago in an interview with four mechanics from Air Canada Jazz...according to those mechanics, there are repeated safety violations on a regular basis with Air Canada Jazz. They tried to use the internal company mechanism and got nowhere. Now those mechanics are suspended, as a result of actively reporting what was in the public interest.

So I come back to the issue of information. Here we have a system that allegedly has broken down internally. How does Transport Canada then intervene to protect the public safety, if we don't have access to that information to understand what is going on? I should note, the series took four years to produce--the Star, the Spectator, and the Record--going through freedom of information requests; that's four years to produce something that is in the public's interest to know almost immediately.

[Merlin Preuss]

In the particular incident you're referring to, we're in the process of determining exactly what was said to whom and when. We're in the process of determining if in fact there are any safety issues, and we'll be more than pleased to report back on that once we have the information.

With respect to the reporting systems that these gentlemen indicated they used, as of this point we have no indication that they used that system. The other aspect of this reporting requirement is that it's still not law, so what we're talking about in terms of what's going into the act, what we're talking about in terms of crucial elements of SMS...they're simply not in place yet. In fact, they're not enforceable, from our perspective.

I don't want to prejudice the case, because these people are put aside for now, but they are getting paid while the investigation goes through with Jazz and with our oversight.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you.

How much time is left? One minute, okay. I'll put my final two questions out then.

We've had SMS with rails, and we've seen, certainly in the last year, a record number of accidents, including in my area. So we have it in place and it doesn't seem to have worked. I'm wondering to what you attribute the high accident rates from last year, which is 2005.

Secondly, the issue of flight attendants is something that has been an issue, as you know, and the real concern is about the lowering of safety standards there. In countries like Australia, they actually have better safety standards with the number of flight attendants to evacuate passengers in the event of an emergency. New Zealand actually has a similar system to the one in the United States. What is the differential?

[Marc Grégoire]

If I may, I'll answer those questions, which I did answer, by the way, when you were away.

On the first question on SMS, SMS implementation is a cultural change. As I explained before, we cannot expect to see major shifts or major safety improvements from one day to the other. We're trying to implement this, and we're trying to instill cultural change throughout the transportation industry in Canada, but it could take years before we see the benefits of that implementation. I could come back later to explain more about this.

On the proposal that we now have for flight attendants, first of all, we are convinced it does not affect the level of safety. If it did, we would not propose it. We're in the safety business, and we're there to maintain or improve safety, not to reduce it. You may hear or you may have heard different points of view on that issue, but we are pretty much convinced that we are not reducing it.

There was in fact a proposal made in 2001 to change the ratio of flight attendants, and we rejected it because we felt it wasn't safe. The proposal that's now on the table has nothing to do with that proposal. The 1 in 50 that we're now proposing is accompanied by a series of mitigation measures, which make it equivalent to the 1 in 40 rule that we have now.

You talked about Australia. We know that the ratio is different in Australia. We also know that in all European countries, in most Asian countries, and in the United States, an approximate percentage of 90% of all the travelling public in the world is using a 1 in 50 rule. We have no evidence in any of those countries that the lack of flight attendants has been the cause of death for people.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Jean.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the guests who provided time today to give us testimony.

I want to confirm this on the record, because the translation in French says one thing and the English says another. Mr. Storseth actually asked the question. I only want to note that the English translation said the opposite of what you are trying to get at, which is that it wasn't as safe. I wanted to confirm that, and you have confirmed the stewardess ratio to Mr. Julian.

Mr. Julian, I would encourage you to read the transcripts, because it was very clear.

Nevertheless, I know the previous government started this SMS procedure, or they worked on it for pretty well the past 13 years. It has been adopted in many other countries, including Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. Is that correct?

[Marc Grégoire]

You're talking about SMS.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Yes.

[Marc Grégoire]

No, not in the U.S.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Are they working on a similar system now?

[Marc Grégoire]

They are working on it, and we are talking to them. One of the leaders was actually New Zealand.

But I should mention that safety management systems throughout the world started after the Bhopal accident in India. That was really when people started to wonder about how to improve safety in our industry. It started in the chemical industry before anywhere else. For aviation, rail, and marine, we have been importing what was learned in the chemical industry.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

I was actually aware of that and I have studied this somewhat. It seems to be a lot of people are very encouraged by what's happening in other parts of the world.

I'm wondering about the organizational structure. What exactly is the organizational structure? You have such a wide mandate on system security. Do you change it by the mode of transportation? Do you have different SMS structures to prevent it for each mode of transport?

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Yes, SMS implementation differs among the modes, and I should say that it differs between safety and security. But in our vision for 2010, we have included the goal of implementing SMS throughout.

This year in aviation, for instance, we're implementing IMS, which would be SMS but inside our own organization. We're analyzing the actual differences among SMS in all the modes to make sure we learn from the experiences of all the modes. Wherever we think it should be increased, we will increase it.

We haven't talked about security today. On the security side, we would like to introduce the same concept and call it security management systems, rather than safety management systems. Both safety and security management systems would be integrated into the operation of an airline, for instance.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

You mentioned you have a subcategory between safety and security in each mode of transportation. Is there any other subcategory that you haven't broken down for the modes, or any other kind of category for which you would separate the SMS system?

[Marc Grégoire]

We have started with the big operators now, both, as I explained before, in marine, and in aviation, and in the rail. Actually, the first three companies to embark on the process were CN, VIA Rail, and CP. These are the big ships in marine, and in aviation what we call the “705 regulation”, the Canadian aviation regulation number 705, which is the companies operating aircraft with 20 passengers and more. So these companies now are regulated, and we're now looking at means and ways to introduce the concept to smaller companies, eventually including airports, flight schools, and small ships. New Zealand, for instance, has introduced a concept, a simple SMS framework, for sail schools. So it's a very small operation but a simple system.

[Brian Jean, Conservative, Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB]

Excellent.

My questions are quick because I don't have much time. Did you develop all of this yourself, or through the department? Or did you look at other jurisdictions that are utilizing it or developing it, such as the United States, and work with them on it?