You're referring to what you're calling a whistle-blower approach, are you not?
These provisions are far from being whistle-blower provisions. We considered a possible whistle-blower program but realized that under the safety management system we wanted a better cooperation and coordination between employers and employees, and to ensure a good safety culture and good working relationship we realized that whistle-blower provisions were not what was required.
What we're doing here is asking employers, under a set of regulations already in place, to have within their SMS system a voluntary reporting, with a non-punitive policy whereby people can report without fear of reprisal inside the company.
What we're seeing here is that if Transport happens to be auditing or assessing a company and happens to observe information reported by an employee to an employer, that information will be protected from use against either the employer or the employee for enforcement, and also under access to information, if there were....
Supposing we bring the information back to the office—and we are under the access to information purview—it's going to be protected by section 2 of the Access to Information Act. We want people to be free to report to their employer blunders they may have committed, little violations that may lead to a bigger problem. We want them to be able to fix them. That's why we say report it.
If we happen to view this when we examine and audit you, we will not use that type of thing against you and make it available. This is one part of the voluntary reporting.
Later on, in another provision, we are creating what we call a universal voluntary non-reporting program for those people who are not governed by SMS, mainly for the general aviation public or small “other aircraft” maintenance engineers or others, everybody who would want to report information of a violation that was not intentional or that is not something criminal.
There, we are emulating an American system—called the ASRS, aviation safety reporting system, in the States—that was considered very successful, to obtain safety data we would not otherwise obtain because people would not come forward to tell you they had committed a blunder and that some safety aspect was involved.
Now, with this process, the Americans have realized they are getting much information that they can put to good use. They identify it and put it to good use to help advance and improve the safety of the travelling public. That's another system.
So there are two systems there. The main purpose is to obtain as much safety data as we can obtain, because we're in a world where we need that safety data to go the extra mile. As we said earlier, it's not by giving more sanctions that aviation safety will improve.
We've been shown in the past that if you sanction someone and don't help them find the root cause for their having done something wrong, they'll never learn and will keep doing it again; whereas now, with our new systems, we want to give them the opportunity to find the root cause factor and take corrective measures themselves and not do it again. This is the way we are thinking about advancing safety.
