Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members.
Good afternoon. My name is Captain Brian Boucher. I am the senior director of flight safety for the Air Canada Pilots Association and also have been an airline pilot with the company for over 29 years, and over 30 years as a pilot in Canada. We appreciate this opportunity to comment formally on Bill C-6, an act to amend the Aeronautics Act.
ACPA represents the 3,000 pilots who fly Air Canada's mainline fleet of 200 narrow-body and wide-body aircraft, domestically and around the world. We deal daily with the operational implications of air regulations. It's not an exaggeration to say that flight safety is our world, and it's been my personal world for over 25 years, as a member of the Dryden inquiry and working with Justice Moshansky for over two years implementing recommendations.
The Minister of Transport is responsible for regulating and supervising aviation in Canada. We understand that the rationale for the bill is to enhance the safety of Canada's aviation system, and we believe that SMS is an important advance in this area.
In the era of SMS, more responsibility is placed on the individual carrier and its management to maintain an adequate safety standard. The regulations also call for an effective means of involving employees, the front-line employees, and their representatives in the implementation and ongoing development of SMS. Those representatives are all the associations within the company, or the corporation that I work for, Air Canada. This participation is necessary in order that SMS can succeed in delivering greater safety. I like to look at that as the three-legged stool. It's not doing away with Transport Canada regulatory body; it's all of us working together as a three-legged stool--the regulatory, the airline, the corporation and those associations.
A key element of SMS is the promotion of a healthy culture of safety, and that's where we have to focus, on culture. In order to succeed, employees must feel free to report errors, safety deficiencies, and inadvertent regulatory violations without the fear--and that's what we've dealt with in the years past--of legal or disciplinary action or damage to reputation. Full reporting provides the data that is one of the fundamentals of SMS. This will only be forthcoming where the confidentiality of reporting is protected to the greatest degree possible. At Air Canada we've been collecting this data now for over five years, way before SMS came to be.
I'll give you an example. Our pilots have been reporting air safety reports. Five years ago we were collecting on average 300 a year among 3,000 pilots. Today we're collecting almost 5,000. So you can see how the culture among our pilots is changing because they know that they don't have to worry about discipline at the end of the road.
In addition, the regulator must have both the ability to oversee the implementation of SMS on an ongoing basis and the determination to hold an airline and its responsible executives accountable for providing and maintaining such a system. We need to have that accountable executive. The role of the regulator changes under SMS; you've heard that. It does not disappear, and I hope we never see it disappear. The regulator must ensure through oversight and observation that companies are able to maintain the integrity of SMS and all those business climates.
ACPA has some specific concerns about the bill that we would like to flag. We are concerned about the power to delegate its rule-making functions, particularly in the airline environment. The act should not permit the designation of airlines or airline business groups to make their own regulations. In a highly competitive business environment, and we're faced with that, and we've been faced with it for the last ten years, airline management lacks the necessary independence from purely commercial goals.
ACPA would support the delegation of personal licensing authority to self-governing professional bodies of airline pilots, along the lines of the medical and the legal professions that are out there today. This would provide an independent verification of airline flight training programs and operating procedures.
We also have serious concerns about how safety information such as air safety reports and flight data from flight data analysis safety programs is treated under this bill. This data monitors and records every action, even every cockpit control movement. Up to 1,800 flight and system parameters are continuously monitored, all in order to promote flight safety. Such data collection under SMS is highly personal and invasive.
You can imagine this, in the job you do today. Up to 1,800 parameters are being recorded, and it's not only the cockpit voice recorder that you're used to, plus the flight data recorders. This is over and above that. There are 1,800 parameters.
We've managed to convince our pilot group that in the interests of safety we can monitor trends and analysis to enhance the safety we have in this country right now. Our pilots bought into that program. It was a tough sell. It was us, the flight safety people within our organization, who made this program work.
At present such flight data is subject to a detailed agreement between our association and Air Canada. This agreement works very well in promoting flight safety goals. Under the agreement, ACPA safety representatives, not Air Canada management, are the gatekeepers of this data. This protection has fostered a relationship of trust where vital safety analysis is shared without the risk of violating the privacy and security of the pilot.
These protections are removed under the proposed subclause 5.394(1), which states:
The Minister, for the purpose of promoting aviation safety, may enter into an agreement with an operator of aircraft respecting the collection, analysis, use and disclosure of information derived from a flight data recorder.
As well, the public interest clauses of this bill provide wide discretion in the courts on behalf of the minister to access any and all flight safety data being collected under SMS. Such unregulated access will have a highly damaging effect on the SMS safety culture now being encouraged under SMS at my airline and at other airlines across Canada. We strongly object to the absence of protections for safety data in this bill.
ACPA also strongly objects to the exclusion of the association as a party to any such agreement. It is a needless omission that ignores the vital privacy interests of the individual without enhancing flight safety. In Germany, for example, a pilot's flight data is protected under law, and it is also protected under law in Australia.
ACPA appreciates the opportunity to present its perspective on these issues. Our membership has particular insights to offer, and in going forward we are committed to participating in the formulation in an active and positive way. ACPA representatives are always available to meet with you and your officials to provide whatever further information and assistance is required.
Thank you for your time and your attention.