I'll first answer your first question.
Unfortunately, the report doesn't talk about the strategic plan that was developed by Transport Canada's rail safety directorate in 2005. I don't know why, because it was presented to the panel.
We did some work prior to doing that strategic plan in 2005, and one of the things we did with the industry and with the union was an environmental scan to try to find out where our deficiencies were, trying to focus our plan not only on rail safety but as well on being able to address our internal problems.
The thing that came number one on the list of everyone was inconsistency between all the regions. Another thing that came up at that time was the lack of integration of our program. Another one was the absence of data that we lacked at the time, and another was the resistance to change that we had from our own people.
So we put our plan together. Our plan—before I get into some of the details of the plan—was presented to the railways. We were invited by the Railway Association of Canada to present our plan to all of their members, so we presented it there. After that, some of the railways called us to make presentations to their own management teams, and every year since—I believe it was on October 2, 2006, and May 14, 2007—I have been invited to the Railway Association of Canada to bring everybody up to speed on our plan.
Within that plan, what we've done to improve consistency is implement a quality safety management system as part of rail safety. In that system, there's a series of procedures that we're developing within business processes, in order to standardize everything we do.
We created a safety council wherein all the regions and headquarters are represented. We approve each of those business processes so that everybody understands them clearly, and they become the procedures that everybody will have to follow. We have over 70 of them to do; we are probably one-third done by now. That was one of the tools we've developed to address our inconsistency, to standardize our practice.
We've also done an integration of all our programs into SMS. We don't even call these safety management system audits any more; we call them integrated audits. SMS has really become, since 2005, the cornerstone of our program. Although the report makes it a suggestion that we should do this, it has been done, and we are working on it right now.
There's no doubt that with the implementation of SMS, we have resistance to change within our own organization, and we're the first to admit it; the railway will probably admit it as well. A lot of our people who were used to do inspection audits are a lot more rigorous; they take a lot more time. It takes a while to convert all our people to doing audits, but it's getting better.
To give you an example, last year we did 131 comprehensive audits, seven high-level audits, and well over 2,000 inspections.
So there's an improvement. I don't know whether that answers your question with respect to consistency, but we're really working on it.