Transport Committee on June 5th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We're going to call our meeting to order. I know the clock is a couple of minutes slow.

I was first of all going to ask whether Mr. McGuinty and Mr. Mai—

[A voice]

They will be right here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay.

Mr. Watson.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Chair, let me just apologize to our witnesses that we're delayed in getting to the testimony.

I wanted to ask the committee something this morning. We did give direction to the chair to invite Transport Canada officials back in relation to their action plan in response to the Auditor General's report on rail safety.

I wonder if it would please the committee that we additionally invite Transport officials on the aviation side, to respond to the 2012 Auditor General's report and potentially any questions in relation to the meetings we're holding currently on aviation. I imagine the committee will have some questions for Transport Canada civil aviation officials arising from the study as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I was under the presumption that they would already have been invited, but I'm not sure.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

We only asked about rail, so I just thought about broadening that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Are you okay with that—?

[Some hon. members]

Yes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

We had only asked about rail officials, so I suspect the committee should give you the same kind of consensus to invite the aviation officials. I think we're going to have a lot of questions relative—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes.

I presumed they would have been invited because we're now into the air part of it.

Anyway, that's resolved.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I wanted to be formal about it.

My apologies again to the witnesses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here today. We really appreciate it.

In particular, we have Mr. Chalmers joining us by video conference from Vancouver.

We know how early it is out there, so thank you very much for joining us. We appreciate that. I see that you nodded, so I know you can hear me.

To make sure we don't run into any technology problems, we're going to start with you, Mr. Chalmers, for 10 minutes or less, please.

[Norman Chalmers, President, Pacific Airworthiness Consulting Inc.]

Thank you very much.

Can you hear me okay?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes.

[Norman Chalmers]

Thank you, Chair.

Honourable members, my name is Norman Chalmers. I'm the president of Pacific Airworthiness Consulting.

I have 47 years of experience in the business of aviation safety and aircraft airworthiness, including 25 years in Transport Canada Civil Aviation in various positions, including periods as acting regional manager. Besides consulting, I write a bimonthly column for Air Maintenance Update Magazine, which is widely read in Canada and the United States.

Today I limit my comments to safety aviation management systems, SMS, as implemented by Transport Canada Civil Aviation.

On my position regarding SMS, first, SMS is a social engineering experiment on a huge scale, with the Canadian aviation industry safety outcomes as the study objective and the travelling public as the victims. Long-term consequences of these changes are unpredictable, because Transport Canada SMS has no precedent or proven models.

Second, SMS is a good idea, essentially the same as total quality management. Safety management systems, if properly embraced by management and workers, can help companies improve themselves in many areas.

Third, SMS is not a regulatory regime. It's essentially a philosophy invented by reductionist university professors who have studied and dissected disasters in the petrochemical industry. These experts include Reason and Hopkins.

Fourth, SMS can not successfully replace regulatory oversight.

Fifth, SMS is a Transport Canada tactic to save money on employee costs, including numbers and qualifications.

Sixth, SMS is a Transport Canada tactic to avoid being sued in court for allowing unsafe aviation operations.

Seventh, SMS was sold to Canadians, yourselves included, using scare tactics, including using the widely distributed worldwide hull loss projections.

Eighth, the lawmakers of Canada have been negligent. They have ignored the warnings of Canada's best people, including Mr. Moshansky in this committee's 2007 meetings and report.

Ninth, Canada has one of the safest transportation systems in the world as a result of the corporate safety culture of companies and the people working in the industry. It is also a result of the effective regulatory requirements.

Tenth, Transport Canada has started to dismantle those requirements.

Eleventh, SMS implementation by Transport Canada will do long-term and enduring damage to aviation safety in Canada.

Twelfth, it will soon be too late to prevent that damage. Canada will face a very difficult time rebuilding the safety infrastructure that is now being destroyed.

Thirteenth, public opinion regarding “safe aviation” and “safety” do not coincide with Transport Canada's definition and are not supported by Transport Canada's actions.

Those are my positions.

On SMS and PVI implementation, SMS is not an “additional layer”, as it was sold to your 2008 House of Commons committee. It was never planned as an additional layer. At the same time as those individuals were telling the Commons committee that SMS was an additional layer, they were telling us inspectors to stop doing audits. Transport Canada leaders were not truthful.

SMS assessments and program validation inspections have almost totally replaced audits and inspections. I know of no regulatory audits in the last five years. The Aeronautics Act regarding SMS does not address all aspects of SMS as implemented, and the act embeds a vague level of safety.

The CAR 107—when I say CAR, I mean Canadian aviation regulation 107—regarding SMS is vague and nebulous, at barely 300 words. This CAR leaves the requirements in the hands and subject to the whims of the bureaucrats at all levels, from senior mandarins to inspectors, and it encourages bullying.

Transport Canada Staff Instruction SUR-001, revision 5, is the primary SMS compliance document. At about 33,000 words, it defines and implements the intent of the act. It is a third- and fourth-level document. To understand SMS, you must become conversant with SUR-001, with which the vast majority of the aviation community is not familiar.

Other areas of Transport Canada infrastructure have been left without support. No credible organization supports the current directions of Transport Canada. PVIs have totally replaced audits on non-CAR 705 SMS companies or organizations. SMS was implemented without any risk assessment or human resources planning. SMS was designed and pushed into place by people with no experience in the civil aviation industry. There was no formal or recorded public consultation. The program bypassed the CARAC process of public consultation despite Transport Canada assurance regarding CARAC involvement. The training for inspectors was and is poor.

SMS is implemented but has little effect on the SMS companies under CAR 705. SMS is implemented for the rest of the non-CAR 705 industry. The implementation has stalled or died.

There is decaying regulatory infrastructure. Having Transport Canada policy-makers and Ottawa staff's total focus on SMS has left other areas of aviation regulation to decay. Implementation and administration of SMS have been taking up almost all the time and effort of the whole staff of Transport Canada.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada aviation watch-list contains 85 open safety recommendations, some with Transport Canada responses found unsatisfactory. There are regulations and standards that have been technically wrong for years.

The results of Transport Canada Civil Aviation's overall attitudes and actions can be easily found in the reactions of the public safety experts. You will find further evidence in the public service employee survey organizational results. The number of working days lost due to employee absence on medical grounds should be examined, with emphasis on stress leave, in line with the cases I know about.

Long-term results on aviation safety for Transport Canada's new approach, including reliance on SMS, will only be evident in the long term when Canada's aviation safety record changes in relation to the rest of the technologically developed world, which currently shows improvements in safety. If the government is truly interested in aviation safety in Canada and in the effects of SMS implementation, it ought to conduct opinion surveys of Transport Canada's own inspectors and the Canadian aviation industry.

That's it for me. I think I beat the 10-minute deadline.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes, you did. Thanks for very much for staying within the time, Mr. Chalmers.

We'll now move to Mr. Daniel Slunder with the Canadian Federal Pilots Association.

Go ahead for 10 minutes or less, please.

[Capt Daniel Slunder, National Chair, Canadian Federal Pilots Association]

I will begin by saying that I will do my presentation in English, but that I can then answer any questions in French.

Thank you for inviting me to participate in this important study. I know the mandate given to this committee flows from the tragic events of Lac-Mégantic last summer. For her foresight and fortitude, I want to thank Minister Raitt for expanding the scope of your inquiry to include safety in other modes of transportation.

We believe that Minister Raitt and your committee can make a difference that will save lives by recommending changes in the way Transport Canada oversees safety in commercial aviation. We also believe that the transition to SMS in aviation has exposed and continues to expose the travelling public to higher levels of risk and that Transport Canada—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'm sorry, Mr. Slunder. Could you just slow down a little bit? The interpreters are having a little trouble keeping up.

[Capt Daniel Slunder]

Yes, but then there goes the 10 minutes, and the important stuff is at the end.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You have 10 minutes to do it. You can adjust.

[Capt Daniel Slunder]

I hear you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Sorry, but they have to do their job as well.

[Capt Daniel Slunder]

The Canadian Federal Pilots Association is not opposed to SMS. We have great concerns about Transport Canada's SMS, which has become the sole layer of safety in Canada.

By way of introduction, I've been a pilot for 40 years. The bulk of my experience was with the Canadian military, where I served for 23 years, instructing on jets and patrolling Canada's ocean coastline. I worked at Transport Canada for the remainder of my career training pilot inspectors, managing the approved check pilot program, and in other areas.

Just as I served the Canadian public in the military, I consider the work I now do to be in the public interest.

Our members are 382 licensed pilots who work as inspectors at Transport Canada and the Transportation Safety Board. We also represent 32 licensed pilots who work at Nav Canada.

I can tell you that the number of licensed pilot inspectors is at its lowest. Today we have 50 fewer inspectors than when I last appeared before this committee in November 2009 when Transport Canada promised to hire more inspectors.

One of the first witnesses who appeared before your committee was Auditor General Michael Ferguson. His testimony cast long shadows of doubt over the evidence placed before you by Transport Canada officials concerning rail safety. Among other things, Mr. Ferguson told your committee that Transport Canada had completed only 26% of the SMS audits of rail companies the department said were needed to ensure compliance with safety regulations. This and other comments were in sharp contrast to remarks of Transport Canada officials who testified to you only days before Mr. Ferguson.

I think Mr. Watson's comment, following the Auditor General's testimony, was most appropriate and I quote:

...I sense that if we were to read between the lines, not only did Canadians expect better from Transport Canada, I suspect you did as well, and I know the government expected better too.

Some of you will be familiar with the Auditor General's review of Transport Canada's aviation safety program. His office conducted an audit in May 2008 and a second one in April 2012. When you line up the audit findings for rail and aviation, the parallels are striking. According to the Auditor General, both Transport Canada's rail and aviation safety programs fail in these areas: the number of inspectors and engineers needed to ensure safety is unknown; significantly fewer inspections are done than planned; the minimum acceptable level of surveillance to ensure safety is not established; and there's no documented rationale for changing the acceptable minimum level of surveillance.

Officials may try to assure you that all of these issues have been addressed, but Transport Canada's rosy forecast is based on a simple sleight of hand. Inspections, once required annually, can now be as infrequent as once every five years. That's one way to stretch your inspection resources, but does it have anything to do with safeguarding the public?

It is important to emphasize that aviation SMS is not intended to be a stand-alone buffer against safety failure, and it never was. This makes perfect sense. Redundancy is an important principle in safety; when one fails, another is in place to ensure that nothing bad happens. Yet today aviation SMS is pretty much the sole safety program, as Transport Canada has all but abandoned direct operational oversight of airlines.

Canada was among the first countries to embrace aviation SMS. In 2005 it was first introduced among the major carriers. There was no beaten path to follow, it was an experiment. As a brand new approach, Transport Canada did not anticipate the implementation of SMS would consume all its inspection resources, and then some. Something had to give and that something was direct operational oversight, which all but disappeared. We seldom, if ever, conduct no-notice inspections, ramp checks, pilot check rides, and other activities that once gave us a window into the state of safety of an airline.

Other safety concerns are being cut to this day under the weight of cumbersome SMS. For example, TC is cancelling all comprehensive SMS assessments for airports and aerodromes in favour of doing only more narrowly focused process validation inspections.

When Transport Canada tells you about the thousands of audits and inspections it's done annually, you should keep in mind three important points. First, the numbers are inflated. The Auditor General blew the whistle on Transport Canada's inspection claims with respect to rail. Transport Canada simply cannot conduct up to 30,000 inspections with only 250 front-line pilot inspectors.

Second, the audits and inspections they talk about involve nothing more than reviewing documents and telephone interviews. It's a superficial exercise that allows serious problems to go unaddressed.

Finally, TC expects to see the accident rate increase and adjusted its forecast performance targets to account for it. The increase, if it materializes, will equate to between 40 and 50 more accidents in 2014 than occurred in 2011. You'll find that at tab 3.

Just a few months ago we asked civil aviation safety inspectors about SMS, and nine in 10 aviation inspectors report that Transport Canada's SMS actually prevents them from correcting safety problems in a timely fashion. This is up from 80%, who worried that this would be the case in the early days of SMS.

Give this your serious consideration. These individuals are professionals, as noted by one of the National Airlines Council of Canada witnesses earlier this week, they care deeply about their work and the safety of the travelling public. Virtually the entire aviation inspectorate thinks SMS is better at hiding safety problems than solving them. You have the full survey report.

I want to bring your attention to two specific examples of the consequences of this reality.

Just months before a First Air jet crashed in Nunavut, a Transport Canada assessment found no problems with the airline safety management system; in fact, it was stellar. Yet, the investigation into the August 20, 2011, crash by the Transportation Safety Board discovered many safety shortcomings of the airline, which contributed to the accident, including the fact that the First Air safety management system was not working properly. Twelve people died in this controlled flight into terrain, and it could have been much worse had the accident occurred with a plane full of passengers landing at a major airport.

Today commercial operators in Canada could go for as long as five years without a single SMS assessment or program validation inspection. That's far too long, and well beyond the international requirement for annual inspections.

Transport Canada's own flight operations department is experiencing difficulties, in spite of SMS, according to documents we have acquired through an access to information request. Even with SMS implemented and the best of intentions, Transport Canada continues to fail to meet minimum safety requirements. TC has had two accidents—the last one was fatal—since implementing SMS.

Witnesses from Air Canada, WestJet, Air Transat, and the NACC testified earlier this week that the SMS partnership between industry and regulators safeguards the public. Members of the travelling public should be concerned when at least half of the partnership can't make SMS work and is crashing aircraft at a rate of every three years.

When we rely almost exclusively on superficial SMS audits and program validation inspections, safety problems get missed, with tragic consequences. Transport Canada's aviation safety program desperately needs to change.

For your consideration, we recommend the following.

Give total ownership and responsibility for SMS to the operators.

Have a concentration of SMS experts within a redesigned branch in Transport Canada available to conduct assistance visits to companies. Its mandate would be to help companies with SMS and to promote the benefits of SMS. These visits would be non-threatening, white-hat validations of assessments to assist the industry in the implementation of SMS.

For the majority of inspectors, simplify the auditing method by removing all of the SMS verification actions in favour of conducting more company visits and random no-notice inspections, including monitors, line checks, and office records checks. To improve intelligence gathering, document the results of all visits. Based on intelligence gathered over the year, return to the company to conduct an annual inspection. Using modern sampling techniques, look strictly for regulatory non-compliance in as many facets of the enterprise as time and finances will permit.

Apply enforcement action for non-compliance where the findings show that SMS wasn't followed or for a non-SMS company that did not make every effort to remedy the situation. This will entice the company to improve its SMS or to move to SMS to capture future errors. The approach uses positive reinforcement where the system worked, or negative reinforcement where the system—

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Slunder, you have less than one minute left.

[Capt Daniel Slunder]

Thank you.

The following are the results that are expected.

The company that doesn't fix its errors by the next audit will be found deficient. More enforcement action will be required. TC thereby documents a record of non-compliance and builds a legal case to suspend their certificate.

The company that fixes the errors by the next audit will be compliant and TC can then extend the audit cycle based on actual measured performances.

For the company that truly takes ownership of its SMS, without TC prescribing anything, and without TC trying to enforce a variable standard, there would be no need for prescriptive regulatory regulations to list all of the requirements.

Finally, TC will have its additional layer of safety well defined and well delineated.

Thank you for your attention. I hope your strength and resolve will result in changes before we suffer another tragedy.