Transport Committee on Feb. 13th, 2014

[Col Steve Charpentier]

Yes. There is no test, are we going to publish or not type of thing. It is us, so far in all the business we've done, we go ahead and we publish it. But in the process of informing the chain of command that we are about to publish it, if they look at the final report and so on, they cannot put any pressure to change the report whatsoever. But they may be concerned about saying something that was, for example, deeply concerning for security matters and say, “Oh, we have to be careful about that one”. I suspect if that were to happen, which I haven't seen, in that case maybe that part would be removed. Still we would publish the report, but without that information, which quite frankly would be irrelevant for the purpose of making sure we share the lesson learned and prevent accidents from happening.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

So there may be a situation where the report is published but information that could compromise Canada's security would be left out?

[Col Steve Charpentier]

That could be. I haven't seen it, so I don't know, but that's how I would play it for sure. We wouldn't want to subtract the whole report because the whole report goes into a lot of detail about training of the pilot, about the engine malfunction, which is valid and we would like to share for sure.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you.

Ms. Young.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you so much again for coming today and for your precise answers.

My question has to do with, and I think you alluded to it, Lieutenant-Colonel Dittmann, the history and the background and why we are now looking at these new changes. Can you provide us with a bit more on that?

[LCol Paul Dittmann]

Certainly. Since the mid-1940s the air force has been investigating accidents and incidents. That process became somewhat more formalized as the Aeronautics Act matured. In the early 1990s the minister directed that an airworthiness program be put in place for the Canadian Forces, and there were several airworthiness authorities that were generated from that, one of which is the Airworthiness Investigative Authority.

At that time, the only mechanism to investigate accidents and incidents was under the National Defence Act. We quickly realized in the mid-nineties, through a board of inquiry process, that this was coming into conflict with the free and open reporting culture, the transparency, and the perception that the chain of command was influencing the outcome of preventive measures, which is the furthest from the intention. As a result of that, the minister had directed that the chief of the defence staff establish an independent airworthiness investigative authority, which is what we have today.

One element that's important, particularly to the ministers making the reports public, is that the chief of the defence staff's delegation order to the airworthiness investigative order has been modified over time. The last was modified in 2008 when the chief of the air force said that the airworthiness investigator was not independent enough from the chain of command, and so he specifically directed that terminology with respect to independence be inserted. The intention there is to again modify the delegation order from the chief of the defence staff to include that administrative process to make the reports public.

[Col Steve Charpentier]

I would add that we have a very good system and we have been a bit of a leader in that system, which started in 1942. At the time there were a lot of crashes because of the new jet engine, and so on. The core of our program is free and open reporting. In order to make sure that people feel confident that they can report without being disciplined, losing their job, or going to jail, we established that system where we protect testimony. They can come to us, they can send emails, we connect to them, and we never use that information. This is really at the heart of this in order for people to feel good about it.

After that, because of that, they come, they report, we are able to come up with good preventive measures, but the other aspect of the program is to be very transparent and to share as much as possible all the relevant information—not the testimony, of course—to make sure it's not going to happen. This is well understood by everyone in the chain of command because it's part of our culture.

I did some exchanges as part of my career in the Canadian Forces with foreign military. I spent three years in another system where it's a punitive system. Everyone hides stuff, and this is bad, this is really bad.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time is well over.

Mr. Sullivan, five minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

Hearing Colonel Charpentier, I feel very confident. I get a wonderful feeling of your sense of what this system should look like, and I appreciate that.

For clarity, because I was just rereading the definition of “military civilian”, it is anything that involves a civilian, or more than one civilian, and a military aircraft, or an aircraft that is being used by the military. But it doesn't necessarily, for example, mean that any aircraft that the military were to contract to someone, or, for example, if a bunch of military personnel were flying on a civilian aircraft, that would not constitute a military-civilian occurrence. Am I right?

[Jim Armour]

It depends on the contract. If you're a ticket-buying passenger on Air Canada, no, but if there was a contract in place that had a special military application for an Air Canada appliance or aviation resource, then it might.

So let's say we were contracting to X company and they were going to haul munitions for us to an operational zone. Even though it's a completely civilian-driven aircraft, the regulations with respect to what's on it are military, so it becomes a military aviation resource. In that case if there was ever an occurrence or an accident in that case, we would be the lead investigators.

Our MOU with the Transportation Safety Board would also pull them in because they have expertise, knowledge in the type of operation that would be going on with that aircraft. So military investigators have a tremendous amount of experience with various aircraft, but they don't have excellent knowledge of every aircraft. So if an aircraft of that nature was involved, we would use our MOU with the TSB. We would bring some of their experts in and conduct the investigation as a coordinating investigation, but it would be led by the military.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Okay, that's much clearer. Thank you.

Colonel Charpentier, you mentioned that there are 3,300 investigations a year already, and I believe there's an increase in involvement of civilians in aircraft and in connections between the military and civilian personnel. So you see this number going up, I suspect. Or do you?

[Col Steve Charpentier]

Actually, the good news is we try to invest a lot in prevention. When we do investigations, somewhere we have failed prevention. Prevention, as you know, is a very tough job.

So the number is going down. I'm going around showing the stats right now, and we have fewer accidents than we had in the last 10 years. So we're doing better through prevention, through better airworthiness, and possibly through a better investigation process and sharing all that information. We have a system in which each one of those occurrences is reported. Everybody in Canada can access it and see what happened there—what they have done and the lessons learned. We use that and hammer down the thing. It's all about sharing information.

I must put a caveat in that contrary to the TSB.... the TSB doesn't investigate everything. They investigate no major accident, which would be in the best interests of the public and so on. We investigate everything. Somebody installed a wrong bolt to something somewhere and someone cut that, they would come forward and say that during the inspection for the pre-flight this morning, they realized that was not the right bolt there. All right, fine, we enter it, this is an occurrence.

We have a network of more or less 330 investigators. They all report to me for investigation purposes only. Some have different qualifications, but those types—you know, like investigating why this bolt was there instead of that bolt—that would be done locally. They would follow the process, they would report to us, and so on, just to explain.

As I said, there are four classes of investigation. Most of those 3,300 things are little stuff like that, or a pilot that did not sign the proper documentation before going flying, and that type of thing. That's what I mean by we invest a lot in prevention. Those could have led to an accident, but never had an accident. But for us there was a possibility, so we investigated.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. Toet, five minutes.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for this wonderful presentation today. It is very helpful.

My question is on the military investigators and the new powers that they will essentially have under this. You talked about that in your brief on page 6 and some of the changes that will happen there. You also just mentioned you have 330 investigators. Will all of them have these new powers and how are they going to be trained in this? What kind of training and qualifications will they require to exercise these new powers in an appropriate manner?

[Col Steve Charpentier]

No. We have a system. We have a book and a special annex that mentions what authority is delegated to certain types of investigators, and so on.

The higher levels of those types of authorities will be retained here in Ottawa and will be delegated case by case if we assess that there's a need to delegate that. We're not going to go and give authority to everybody. Only people who would have received special training and clearly understand it would be able to do that.

The example I was using of the young guy in the unit in charge of investigating missing bolts and those types of things would never have that type of authority. But if he needs to, because he is following a lead that leads to some information that is, in the end, a civilian contractor who he doesn't want to provide, then he would have to go up to us. Most likely, in this case, when we are at that stage, one of my key experts who is trained and has a lot of experience would go down, and I would delegate some of those powers in order for him to be able to conduct it.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Okay, I have just one follow-up question.

You talked about the civilian information. It's been mentioned many times. There seem to be two aspects of this, and correct me if I'm wrong on that. One of your concerns was their being able to release information on part of an investigation, so there was a bit of a lack of a desire to go to them because you had that fear of communications going out that you didn't want going out. But you also just talked about now the ability to have them have to give you information. Is that the other aspect to it? Or is there more to it besides those two parts as far as that interaction with the civilian information is concerned?

[Col Steve Charpentier]

You're bang on, I would say.

Right now the only thing that enables us to go and get that information is a contractual arrangement that we have with them where they must participate and voluntarily release the information. This is good, as far as contracts go, but there could be some cases where they don't want to release that information.

This relationship with civilian contractors is not new, but we don't have a lot of history behind it. If we ever get to a case where there are fatalities involved and there's really bad stuff and the deeper we're going to go...we don't administer disciplinary...but sometimes the perception in the civilian field is just that. All we want is to find out what happened and to prevent it from happening, but we sure don't want people trying to retain some information that would be valuable in trying to identify it, because maybe the cause is bad training on their part, bad systems. That's where there's a little bit of controversy.

[Jim Armour]

I'd like to add something to that.

When civilians supply us with information, this is going to allow us to protect that information. The information that's provided to us would only be for accident investigation purposes.

With that in mind, they're more likely to share information that they may have, whereas if they're worried about it being released and having negative consequences for their business, then they're much more reluctant to share that type of information.

[Lawrence Toet, Conservative, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Thanks.

Ms. Young, I think you had a follow-up, didn't you?

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Yes. I'd just like to probe that a little bit more, Mr. Armour. However, given the fact that the report is free and open, and it's published, and the fact that people can get it through FOI, what exactly are you saying, then?

[Jim Armour]

Our reports are a compilation of all the facts that we've gathered in our analysis. From the analysis we make findings and preventive measures.

Particularly for detailed information, we're not obligated to publish that in our reports. So we don't say, “He said this, she said that, and from that we conclude that....” We make conclusive statements based on facts and information that we've gathered, and from that we make our recommendations. It's not attributable in the way we compile our reports. That's because in the process of producing a report, we do a draft for comment that goes out to anybody who has a concern with the accident. They make comments back to us and that may amend what we are actually saying in our report. It's a fact check. They may be reluctant to fact check if they are worried about anything they were to say being open for anybody to look at.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time is up. We will come back to you.

[Wai Young, Conservative, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Mai for five minutes.

[Hoang Mai, NDP, Brossard—La Prairie, QC]

Can you give us an example of the last investigation? Mr. Sullivan was saying that there are a lot of investigations but not a lot of incidents or accidents. Could you give us the bigger accidents in terms of what has happened?