Transport Committee on April 27th, 2010

[Jennifer Lynch]

Is there a better way?

[Bonnie Crombie, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Yes, a better way than behavioural profiling; because that seems to be the direction we're going.

[Jennifer Lynch]

Again, I would be very pleased....

I know that you'd like me to give you an answer. I'm not a security expert. As for the ways, I can't comment. As for the rights being affected by those ways, I'm always pleased to come before the committee to comment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you very much.

I'm sorry that we don't have more time, but perhaps we'll do this again.

Mr. Jean.

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

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, the witness described that discrimination, I think, was justifiable under certain circumstances.

I was wondering if she could refer the committee to what those circumstances would be. Quite frankly, I don't understand where they would be acceptable under any circumstances. Based on the paper “The Effectiveness of Profiling from a National Security Perspective” from the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I just would like to have more clarification on that. I do not accept that as a premise. I would at least like to be referred to some documentation to support her claim.

[Jennifer Lynch]

Yes. I can certainly understand--

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

I'm not asking a question, because I'm not allowed to.

[Jennifer Lynch]

Oh.

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

What I'm asking is if you could give the chair any of those things.

[Jennifer Lynch]

Yes. It's section 1 of the charter, section 15 of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

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

I'm familiar with both, but I'm not familiar with where they suggest discrimination is at all acceptable in Canada, or justifiable. That's what I would ask that you refer to the chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

If I could just ask you to maybe just send me a note through the clerk, I'll share it with the committee members.

[Jennifer Lynch]

Certainly.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you very much.

We'll take a two-minute break, then we'll invite our other guests to the table and get back to it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you, and welcome back.

We are continuing with our study of aviation safety and security, safety management systems for the aviation industry.

Joining us today from the Air Canada Pilots Association are Paul Strachan, president; and chairs Barry Wiszniowski and Tim Manuge.

From the Air Line Pilots Association, we have Al Ogilvie and Dan Adamus.

I think you've been here often enough to know the routine, so I'll ask you to make a brief presentation, and then we'll move to questions and answers.

[Captain Paul Strachan, President, Air Canada Pilots Association]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As you mentioned, my name is Captain Paul Strachan, and I am the president of the Air Canada Pilots Association. I hail from Winnipeg, Manitoba. I spent a ten-year career as an air force pilot before commencing my commercial career, and I have been flying for about 22 years.

With me here is Captain Tim Manuge. He is the chair of the ACPA security committee. Tim is from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent 20 years as an RCMP reserve officer and 36 years now as a pilot.

Next to him is Captain Barry Wiszniowski, hailing from Drumheller, Alberta. Most of us live in Barrie now, though. He worked for eight years as an air force aircraft maintenance engineer and 24 years now as a pilot. Interestingly, he is also an aviation accident investigator, and he is the chair of our technical and safety division at the Air Canada Pilots Association.

Our organization represents the largest group of professional pilots in the country, some 3,000 men and women who fly Canada's mainline fleet. Obviously, if you are following my slide presentation, then you know intuitively that we fly tens of thousands of people on a daily basis--in, we are very proud to say, a very safe fashion, and often in very trying circumstances. Our environment is one of the harshest on the planet, in fact, in terms of aviation, so we are proud of that record and we believe we carry a lot of international credibility as a result. So we can offer the committee a unique perspective on issues pertaining certainly to aviation safety and to aviation security as well, and that is what we would like to highlight for you today.

I will briefly make comments on SMS as it pertains to the industry; on flight times and duty times, a matter of interest and a matter of concern for us for most of the last couple of decades; and aviation security, which has already been discussed this morning.

ACPA's number one priority is safety. It is our first and foremost responsibility and we take it very seriously. We maintain a full-time division of our organization dedicated solely to technical and safety issues, of which Captain Wiszniowski is the chair, and we spend a lot of time and effort separating the activities of our technical and safety division from our representational and industrial activities as the certified bargaining agent for the Air Canada pilots. So we jealously guard that credibility and we're very careful not to mix the two. Our security committee works closely with several government agencies on the issue of aviation security in support of those issues.

If I may, looking first at safety management systems, the Air Canada Pilots Association supports the SMS initiative. We have a mature relationship with our employer. I think it would be fair to say that many, if not the majority, of the advancements in aviation safety within the industry within the last 30 to 40 years stem from that relationship between Air Canada and its pilots group, both this one and its predecessor.

In that mature and cooperative relationship, SMS works very well. Other carriers do not necessarily enjoy the same robust relationship with their employer, so that is a caution for the committee. ACPA believes that strong oversight from the regulator remains required in an SMS environment.

Flight time and duty time regulations: this has been a matter of some interest recently, but you can see from our first slide that it has been in fact a matter of interest for quite a long time. Our current flight time and duty time regime was developed in the 1960s, in fact before seat belts were mandatory in automobiles. It was cosmetically amended in the mid-1990s, and a lot has changed since then. There has obviously been rapid advancement in aircraft technology, allowing aircrafts to fly higher and much farther than they have in the past, and obviously the scientific knowledge surrounding fatigue and those physiological factors that are a reality in any industry, but certainly in ours given those changes, has evolved as well.

If you look at our slide on the effects on performance of fatigue versus alcohol, it captures a good parallel there between hours of wakefulness and relative tracking performance on the Y axis versus blood alcohol concentration. This derives as a result of the work of a pre-eminent research scientist in Australia by the name of Drew Dawson.

Canada trails the world, unfortunately. ICAO has recently called on member states to update their flight time and duty time prescriptive regulations to be based upon science. Europe has already changed its own some time ago. The U.S. is in the process of implementing changes to their regime. Unfortunately, we here in Canada are now proposing a CARAC process to commence sometime this summer. CARAC is kind of like baseball in that after you hit the ball, it takes a couple of years to get to first base. And there's obviously no guarantee at the end of that process that any effective change will result.

We don't believe this looks good on any of us, whether we be regulators, airlines, or operating pilots. It's far past time for Canada to amend its regime, and we're here to help you do that, to help the government move forward, and the regulator to bring those amendments into place, because currently we are not compliant with the ICAO stipulations.

The next chart is probably the most visually grabbing. On the X axis are hours of the clock from 1 to 24, and on the Y axis are hours on duty, limitation of hours on duty, from nine at the bottom up to 14 at the top.

You can see there's a green line on here, in between the U.S.A. Aviation Rulemaking Committee, the United Kingdom's CAP 371, and the European operations regime. The green line is the contract we've negotiated at the bargaining table for our regime. But they're all approximating the same thing: they recognize that those back-of-the-clock hours are not times of day when we perform to the highest of our abilities.

Now, clearly--as I say, we've negotiated this--safety should not be negotiable. What we need is a regulator to set a level playing field for all parties to live by, based on that evolution in science that has occurred and on how much more we know about it today.

That red line across the top represents the current Canadian aviation regulations. This is based on two pilots, so it's not going into depth in terms of ultra-long-range operations and things like that, but those are things we need to discuss as well.

Perhaps most astounding in this chart is that, if you can imagine, a pilot today could be on call from five o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock in the evening, and receive a call for work and report for work prior to nine o'clock in the evening and operate to the limit of that red line.

So Canada needs leadership, and it has to come from the regulator. When we have approached the regulator on this, as we've done several times in the last couple of decades, they have told us that we didn't have any Canadian data and that we needed to collect it.

So we set about doing that, and we are collecting data, but of course anything we might collect is both tainted and flawed. It's tainted de facto because people automatically assume that there's some sort of industrial agenda here. If you flip back to the chart, you'll see very quickly that there is no industrial impact to our members whatsoever. We've negotiated what approximates what the regulatory regime should be, so this is a warm-water issue for our members. It's the right thing to do from a public policy perspective.

To level the playing field, again, we offer you our assistance and support, but we need a responsive process most of all, and the CARAC process is not that. We're looking at years down the road before we effect any change. The data is there. The science is there. Other jurisdictions have moved. So we strongly support rapid movement on this. We certainly don't want another accident in Canada attributable to pilot fatigue. That's body-bag safety policy, and we don't want to see that here.

On security issues, recent events, including the bombing attempt in Detroit of last Christmas, have revived fears again. We welcome the government's focus on improving security, particularly on behavioural pattern recognition. We feel that this must be done in ways that don't discourage travel by the innocent public, because doing so is simply rewarding terrorism. So we have to find responsive means to address the real threat. From our perspective, we do see problems with the current security structure. However, we seek to make a constructive contribution. The point of the exercise is not to apportion blame but to improve the Canadian aviation safety regime, and we're anxious to participate and assist in that endeavour.

Technology is only one part of it. When you think about it, there are two sides to the sphere. One side of the sphere is keeping bad things off planes, which we've spent an awful lot of time doing, but we haven't really paid a lot of attention to keeping bad people off planes.

And really, those things aren't all bad; they're only potentially bad. They have to be in the hands of a bad person in order to be a threat.

So we're happy to hear that we're going to be paying more attention to keeping bad people off planes as opposed to just bad stuff.

We are in fact finalizing a lengthy study on the state of the Canadian aviation security regime. We expect that a final copy should be ready in about a month's time.

We would be happy, Mr. Chair, to provide the committee with a copy of that, should it be interested.

If you could indulge me, Mr. Chair, could my colleagues perhaps each give you a one-minute brief comment before we sum up?

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Very briefly.

[Capt Paul Strachan]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Tim.

[Captain Tim Manuge, Chair, Security Committee, Air Canada Pilots Association]

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members, thank you for the opportunity.

Captain Paul here indicated that we're finalizing a white paper on security, which we've been authorizing from the security committee. We hope there will be viable recommendations for your consideration. These mostly stem from discussions with our members on a daily involvement on the front line of the airline industry, from discussions with other pilots, both domestic and internationally, and from attending many of the international security conferences.

In the interests of brevity, I'll confine my remarks quickly to outlining a couple of main concerns that we have from the ACPA security committee.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we recommended that a single federal government department be responsible for civil aviation security. This did not occur. Currently, civilian airport authorities, crown corporations, and numerous other bodies all own parts of the aviation security program in Canada. We have carefully assessed the system as to the way it now operates, and we reaffirm our recommendation for a single federal government department to manage the aviation security in Canada.

Second, the position is that we need to fight terrorism through proactive intelligence-gathering and good police work. I cite a very strong case here of the liquid bombers in England in August 2006. They were not brought down as a result of screening. They were solely brought down as a result of good investigative work, good intelligence, good police work.

As a part of the proactive effort, we are also very much in favour of the behavioural pattern system using behavioural pattern recognition techniques; however, we are opposed to it being implemented and utilized by CATSA.

Frankly, we believe this may cause more problems than it resolves. Behaviour pattern recognition is a complex program. It requires experience, and operators who are intuitive and can establish trust within the airport community.

Finally, we're anxious to see affirmation of several recent government reports, including the Auditor General's report on airports, the RCMP criminal intelligence report--called the “SPAWN report”--and the CATSA review, which all basically state that ground crew access to air terminals remains a pre-eminent threat. ACPA supports additional scrutiny in all ingress and egress points at airports and the screening of these employees, their company equipment, trolleys, and bags.

Those are our major concerns. More specific measures will be spelled out in our white paper, as mentioned.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

[Captain Barry Wiszniowski, Chair, Technical and Safety Division, Air Canada Pilots Association]

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and other panel guests.

I'm in charge of the technical and safety division for the Air Canada Pilots Association. We have 3,000 professional pilots who have input into what we do each and every day. Each one of those pilots is the subject-matter expert. They're the front-end users of their system. We're the ones who know about the backside of the clock, the window of circadian low, when we're working with our flight and duty times.

Our group is the only association in Canada that is collecting data on fatigue. This came from several meetings that we had with Transport Canada saying that there was no data.

We could fill this room with CDs full of fatigue-related data, and yet it has not been recognized in Canada.

ICAO annex 6, amendment 33, says that flight and duty times shall be based on scientific data. That's where we want to go. That's where we're looking to move. In December all the pilot groups, including ourselves, have sent a letter to the minister, from 7,000 of the 11,000 commercial pilots in Canada, recognizing that fatigue is a significant safety issue.

We want to move forward on that, and we're willing to help you.

I'll defer to the panel.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

Dan.

[Captain Dan Adamus, President, Canada Board, Air Line Pilots Association, International]

Thank you, Mr. Tweed.

Good morning, members of the committee.

My name is Dan Adamus. I'm here representing the Airline Pilots Association, International. I'm the president of ALPA's Canada board. I'm a pilot with Air Canada Jazz ,and have been for 25 years.

With me today is Mr. Al Ogilvie. He is ALPA's government affairs representative in Canada.

We appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to express our views on aviation safety and security. I'll take the opportunity to speak to SMS and security issues.

ALPA represents more than 53,000 professional pilots who fly for 38 airlines in Canada and the United States. As our members' certified bargaining agent and as their representative in all areas affecting their safety and professional well-being, ALPA is the principal advocate for pilots in North America. ALPA therefore has a significant interest in all issues affecting aviation in Canada, and is here today to speak to you about ALPA's experience with safety and security matters.

We support the effective implementation of safety management systems in aviation companies that are regulated and certified by Transport Canada. ALPA has embraced SMS as the next great leap forward in advancing aviation safety. We see it as a comprehensive corporate approach to safety that involves both management and employees.

You may ask why ALPA so strongly supports SMS. We do so for many reasons. It clearly establishes accountability for safety at the highest levels within a company. It provides for the reporting of safety occurrences and information without fear of retribution. It requires employee involvement and a formal risk assessment and decision-making process, to name but a few.

Under SMS, a company is not able to ignore a safety issue by saying they are compliant with applicable regulations. If a safety hazard is known or has been identified, a company is required to do a risk assessment and make a conscious decision on what mitigations are required to deal with it.

SMS clearly establishes responsibility for safety where it belongs, and that's with the aviation industry. The traditional method of safety oversight, which is based on detailed technical inspections, may appear to take on the role of operational safety insurance, and that may allow the aviation industry to lapse into thinking and believing that safety is the government's responsibility.

We believe these provisions are absolutely essential to the success of a company's SMS, and can explain our position as follows.

To proactively address safety issues, data is required.

Strategies to enhance safety need to be data-driven.

In the absence of accidents, the right kind of data is required.

Human and organizational factors create errors or hazards that remain largely undetected until the right set of circumstances results in a bad occurrence.

An organizational climate where people feel free from negative consequences when reporting errors, deficiencies, and hazards is essential to obtaining all the data that is available.

Therefore, a reporting program must provide confidentiality and immunity from discipline to be effective. Of course, exceptions would be a wilful or deliberate act, gross negligence, or a criminal act.

It's been ALPA's experience that most companies initiating safety management systems have fully embraced the concepts, adopting a safety culture from top to bottom. Some do not. We have heard expressions of concern regarding protections from punishment and for confidentiality in reporting.

In some situations, personnel who bring forth safety concerns or self-report incidents have still been subject to disciplinary action. The effect is that employees cease to self-report, which stifles the flow of data, thus defeating the very premise of the safety management system.

In these instances, the company has the SMS on paper but has failed to change its culture.

Just to be clear, ALPA supports the effective implementation of an SMS, but our experience shows that a company may be technically compliant but not embrace the underlying concepts. Such an SMS is not an effective SMS.

Even with effective safety management systems, it is still the minister's responsibility to provide comprehensive and effective oversight and to take the appropriate measures when necessary.

When it is apparent that a company does not fulfill its obligations under an SMS, we believe traditional oversight should be utilized rather than the SMS audit system.

ALPA understands that Transport Canada has delayed implementation of SMS for 703 and 704 operators, and is in agreement with the decision. It is a relatively simple matter to legislate the requirement of an SMS, but you cannot legislate the culture change required for an effective SMS. Therefore, taking the extra time for education, encouragement, and mentoring of these operators will be beneficial in the long term, as ALPA believes a voluntary, confidential, and non-punitive reporting program is an essential element of an effective SMS.

Switching to security, today I would like to speak to behavioural recognition techniques, the air travellers security charge, and cargo security funding.

Pilots who fly commercial aircraft are on the front line, and for the last quarter century or so have lived through the evolution of a security system that has seen its share of challenges in meeting threats to aviation safety. Aviation security screening has long focused on the interdiction of threat objects such as guns, knives, and improvised explosive devices. The weapons of choice for attacking aircraft have evolved over time, and the methods for concealing these weapons continually change. The one constant for all would-be attackers, however, is hostile intent.

Current screening procedures are predicated on two general assumptions: every passenger poses an equal threat with limited exceptions; and the primary focus of screening is to identify objects that could be used to harm individuals and/or the aircraft.

As a result, when terrorist tactics change, and/or a different weapon or threat object is used, the security system is reactively adjusted to that new object or tactic. Over time, inadequate responses to the problem have the effect of creating a patchwork of band-aids. Accordingly, we need to shift our resources to identify the person who poses the threat in order to prevent intended malicious acts.

The present security screening philosophy must be altered to embrace two principles. The vast majority of passengers are trustworthy and pose very little or no threat to the flight. The only means of providing genuine security is to positively identify known, trustworthy passengers; process them in an expeditious manner; and concentrate our finite, high-technology behavioural screening resources on the small percentage of passengers whose trustworthiness is unknown or in doubt.

Such a proactive security system aims to defeat the terrorists by anticipating future threats. It would be much more effective and efficient than current security protocols, and reduce security-related inconvenience and delays for the vast majority of the travelling public while protecting passenger privacy to the maximum practical extent. Therefore, ALPA supports the recently announced initiative to introduce the concept of behaviour recognition techniques and a trusted traveller program.

ALPA has continuously objected to the air travellers security charge being imposed on the airline industry, and reiterates its objection to the recent 50% increase in those charges. I've been before this committee over probably 15 years, and I think this comes up almost every time.

The aviation industry is an integral part of the economy in this country. It ties our country together. Canada's aviation infrastructure is a benefit to all Canadians and Canada, and it should not be subjected to unique user fees. Aviation security is of national interest, not one restricted to the airline industry or its passengers. Its cost, like policing or national defence, should be borne by all Canadians rather than through user fees.

Did those who lost their lives in the World Trade Center on 9/11 have anything to do with aviation? Again, aviation is of national interest.

Charging air travellers to recover the cost of security imposes an extra burden on our airline industry. Our airlines operate on unprecedentedly thin margins, and the imposition of another tax on them will further discourage air travel. It may take only another unforeseen circumstance, such as the recent European experience with volcanic activity, to end the operations of another carrier. In recent history we have seen Zoom Airlines and more recently Skyservice cease operation. The last thing air carriers need is an additional tax by another name.

ALPA has long been a proponent of one level of safety and security, not differentiating between passenger and cargo operations where safety and security are concerned. Therefore, we are heartened to see that the budget did allocate an additional $37.6 million over two years to implement a comprehensive air cargo security regime. These funds are much needed, as there is a stark difference between the security afforded passenger operations and that protecting all cargo operations.

Even at large hub airports, access to all cargo operations is much too open. Inadequate threat assessments are used to identify potential insider threats, and security procedures training for pilots and other critical personnel is largely absent. These and other problems plague all cargo operations and must be addressed.

In conclusion, ALPA has been monitoring your hearings and listening carefully to the opinions and positions of the various organizations and individuals who have appeared before you. We're pleased to see much interest in and positive feedback to aviation safety and security issues.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you, the members of the committee, for your time and your efforts. Although you do not always agree on the solutions, I'm pleased to see your continued efforts to enhance aviation safety and security for all Canadians.

I appreciate the time today and would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

Mr. Volpe.

[Joe Volpe, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

Mr. Chair, I'd like to share my time with Mr. Kania.

You know, we want to discuss the implementation of the SMS system and of course some of the security measures that have been put in place. I've noted that all of the witnesses who have come forward have objected to the additional tax that's being placed on air travellers.

We've learned that now the government is going to raise some $3.2 billion over the course of the next five years in order to cover some of the additional investments--that's another word for taxes--on air travel.

But if I could, I'd like to go back to two issues. First, every time you've come here, you've supported the implementation of an SMS system. And on every occasion you have said that you wanted greater input by the regulator; you wanted an active regulator. That's my word, but that's how I've interpreted what you said.

I note here from some of the notes that everybody else has that the SMS system essentially began in about 2001. Over the course of the next six years, there were staged introductions and anticipation that the industry would begin to take care of itself.

Then, contrary to one of the key elements that all of you have always maintained be there, sometime after 2006 we started to see a reduction in the numbers of inspectors by the regulator, so much so that the Canadian Business Aviation Association was, as you know, decertified for the purposes of establishing an SMS system.

You know, this is what bothered me. It irked me when I heard you talk about how the industry should take control. The Transportation Safety Board found that Transport Canada assessed the CBAA in 2006 and found that its monitoring and quality assurance was inadequate, and yet Transport Canada closed its assessment of CBAA without having approved a corrective action plan.

So my question is how far can we trust the industry, of which you are a part?

[Capt Paul Strachan]

Thank you, Honourable Mr. Volpe.

As I said, our organization enjoys a very mature relationship with our employer. And certainly our employer has been around for an awfully long time; we've been at this for about three quarters of a century. We work very cooperatively with our opposites in Air Canada flight operations. In fact, it's very much a cooperative approach between our two groups.

In our experience, SMS has been almost seamless. For our organization, it didn't materially change the culture or the structure from what it was before. But we're one example. I think there are many others in Canada where the same might not be accurately said.

So certainly in those situations there must be an outlet from the SMS process if one party to the process--or both parties--feels it's not working. There has to be some arbiter, some final arbiter of results, stemming from recommendations that arise out of the system.