Evidence of meeting #12 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was investigation.
A recording is available from Parliament.
10 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
There's one five-minute round left, and Mr. Komarnicki, I had a feeling that you maybe wanted to follow up on your last question. If you want to do that then we'll go to Ms. Young.
10 a.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Who determines whether you go to process A or B?
10 a.m.
Senior Investigator, Department of National Defence
Process A would be initiated exterior of the Canadian Forces because it would be a case where we would have an on-board recorder, and somebody would say that they want to discover what's on it. They would go about getting it by going to a court. There's a set of regulations in section 22 as to what the court is supposed to consider.
In case B, a board of inquiry is almost always called when there's a death or an aircraft writeoff or a very serious accident. In the case of B where a board of inquiry may wish to see what's on an on-board recorder, that's why those sets of regulations are there. This is set up to guard the just culture that flight safety stands for. The blameless dissociation with flight safety protection is to protect. You did your best, but you made an error or you mistook an order or something like that, but if you—
10 a.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
What happens when you discover something that is blatantly more than just error in judgment?
10 a.m.
Col Steve Charpentier
I can answer that because I'm briefing a lot of people about it. In the old days, we were maybe a little more into blameless, but nowadays...and the civilians are also using the same because.... I participate in some panels with civilian aviation. We're talking nowadays about the just culture, just culture being a limit to this blameless thing. If you happen to be in front of a drug addict who is pissed off and that morning decided to put sugar in the fuel tank, which resulted in a crash, we're not going to protect that type of information. We're not going to participate in the disciplinary matters. We will turn to the chain of command and tell them they have to look into this because we came across some stuff that is outside our just culture.
10 a.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
I guess I should give my time up. There's an interesting thread there.
Go ahead.
10 a.m.
Conservative
Wai Young Conservative Vancouver South, BC
No. I'm going to share my time with Mr. Komarnicki and let him finish his thread.
10 a.m.
Conservative
10 a.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
If indeed you want to encourage people to come forward and there be no blame, what's the objective standard to decide when you change from that and will that in itself prevent some people in some cases from coming forward?
10 a.m.
Col Steve Charpentier
Again, what we do when we have a difficulty like that is my team will not investigate those matters. We will turn that information over to the chain of command.
Normally the way that happens is we say that during our flight safety investigation we came across some serious allegations concerning something that you should investigate. We're trying to, basically, walk out of it and leave it to the chain of command to conduct their own investigation, testimony, and all of that.
10 a.m.
Conservative
Ed Komarnicki Conservative Souris—Moose Mountain, SK
Everyone in the military would be aware that that's the fact.
10 a.m.
Col Steve Charpentier
They know that, and I would say it's also to protect the military member. When I brief people everybody agrees with the just culture. No one wants to be working and not be able to trust one of their teammates because he is a drug addict or something like that and he's doing stuff that would put his life and the lives of others who he cares for in jeopardy. So the just culture is there to protect them both.
10 a.m.
Conservative
10 a.m.
Conservative
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
Wai Young Conservative Vancouver South, BC
I wanted to get back to Mr. Armour and what we were talking about earlier regarding the contractual resource and when that resource fails or leads to an accident and then it is investigated by AIA and is released in a report.
I'm assuming that the reason for this amendment is because in this area of litigation we're in right now the department anticipates that there may be issues in the future about sharing information obviously on the recordings, etc., so this provides the minister with the authority to compel cooperation from the civilian side. Is that correct?
10:05 a.m.
Senior Investigator, Department of National Defence
Yes. You've actually summarized it very well. There are circumstances in the past 10 years where we've had some difficulty trying to conduct an investigation because a contractor has been reluctant to either share information or do the things that we want them to do.
Under the current legislation there's the ability for the Minister of National Defence to call a board of inquiry under the Inquiries Act, a completely different process from what are blameless investigations. It can involve lawyers and is a very different process.
The AIA has the power to do a board of inquiry. If we had to do a board of inquiry, it's not really the right tool to do what it is that we want to do. We think the Transportation Safety Board Act methodology for approaching these situations is really the right way to go. This amendment really gives us all those powers. On the other hand, if we run into a situation now with an uncooperative civilian agency, we're forced into this board of inquiry situation. It never actually has happened yet, but we've threatened to do it twice. In the end it was a very valuable investigation and we found some very good information about it.
Eventually the contractor agreed that our approach was the way to go, but we could certainly run into a situation in the future, particularly as more and more contractors get involved, where they simply do not want to cooperate and they're not obligated to from a statutory perspective. So that fixes the problem.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Mr. Charpentier, I appreciate your answers. Indeed all of you were very clear and concise and I think answered a lot of questions today. I think it's fair to say on behalf of everybody, colonel and lieutenant-colonel, we appreciate what those of you in the military have done in the past and continue to do. We do appreciate that.
Mr. McGuinty, you had a point of order.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON
Mr. Chair, I asked the other day about the state of the documentation that we asked for I think it's over two months ago. Can you let us know where this is at? I don't understand why this is taking so long. I'm a former senior public servant. These things can be turned around in 48 to 72 hours.
10:05 a.m.
The Clerk
I can give an update to the members of the committee. The department has identified in the transcript the questions that were asked and the information requested by the committee. They have prepared an answer.
They're at the level of approval right now. Once the documents are approved by the department they will be forwarded to the committee. We're just waiting for them at the moment.
10:05 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
I think we have requested them. I'll have the clerk ask for them again and maybe that will jog their memory.
10:05 a.m.
Liberal
David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON
I have a second question, sir, on this point of order.
My whip told me yesterday that there was a situation in the House yesterday, where all travel for all committees was eliminated in the House of Commons. What's going on? Can you help us understand? I'm trying to plan the next three months here.