Transport Committee on June 10th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I want to welcome and thank our witnesses for being here today. We're winding down our study on the transportation of dangerous goods.

With us today we have a number of witnesses. We're going to get right to presentations. I would like to call on Captain Dan Adamus, president, and Mr. Mark Rogers, first officer, of the Air Line Pilots Association.

Go ahead for 10 minutes or less, please.

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

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

My name is Dan Adamus. I'm the president of the Canada board of the Air Line Pilots Association, International, and I'm a pilot with Jazz Aviation.

With me this morning is First Officer Mark Rogers. He is the director of the dangerous goods program with ALPA and is chairman of the dangerous goods committee for the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations, IFALPA. First Officer Rogers is a pilot with United Airlines.

I'll share our views on safety management systems, and First Officer Rogers will address our concerns regarding the transportation of dangerous goods.

The Air Line Pilots Association, International represents more than 51,000 professional pilots who fly for 32 airlines in Canada and the United States. ALPA is also the largest non-governmental aviation safety and security organization in the world. As well as being our members' certified bargaining agent, we are also their representative in all areas affecting their safety and professional well-being. ALPA, therefore, has a significant interest in all issues affecting aviation.

ALPA supports the effective implementation of safety management systems in aviation. 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. But here I must share a cautionary note: ALPA supports the “effective” implementation of an SMS. Now that SMS has been implemented for airline operations, our experience shows that a company may become technically compliant but not embrace the underlying concepts. Such an SMS is not an effective SMS.

ALPA strongly supports SMS 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; and it requires employee involvement and a formal risk assessment and decision-making process. Under SMS a company is not able to ignore a safety issue by saying that it is regulatory-compliant. 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 identifying safety risk where it belongs: with the aviation industry. The traditional method of safety oversight based on detailed technical inspections may appear to take on the role of operational safety assurance. That may allow the aviation industry to lapse into thinking and believing that safety is solely the government's responsibility.

We believe the following provisions are absolutely essential to the success of a company's SMS. 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 serious incident or even an accident.

An organizational climate in which people feel free from negative consequences when reporting errors, deficiencies, and hazards is essential to obtaining all the data that is available, and, therefore, to be effective, a reporting program must provide confidentiality and immunity from discipline, except in cases of a wilful or deliberate act, gross negligence, or a criminal act.

It has been ALPA's experience that most companies initiating SMS have fully embraced the concepts, adopting a safety culture from top to bottom. Unfortunately, a few do not. We have heard expressions of concern regarding protections from punishment and of 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 an SMS on paper, but has failed to change its culture.

Even with an effective SMS, the minister is still responsible for providing comprehensive and effective oversight and for taking the appropriate measures when necessary. When it is apparent that a company does not fulfill its obligations under an SMS, we believe that traditional oversight rather than the SMS audit system should be utilized.

ALPA understands that Transport Canada has delayed the 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 for an SMS, but you cannot legislate the cultural 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.

I will now turn it over to Mark for the dangerous goods portion of our presentation.

[Mark Rogers, Director, Dangerous Goods Program, Air Line Pilots Association, International]

Good morning.

I will provide our perspective on the safe carriage of dangerous goods, and how the implementation of an effective safety management system focused on the transportation of these goods can improve aviation safety.

Specifically, this morning I would like to focus on the transportation of lithium batteries and what must be done to ensure they are carried safely aboard aircraft. Lithium batteries are part of everyday life for millions of people throughout the world, powering applications as varied as laptop computers, cell phones, flashlights, and cameras. These batteries are available in two major chemistries, lithium ion and lithium metal. Lithium ion batteries are generally rechargeable and contain a flammable electrolyte, while lithium metal batteries are non-rechargeable and contain metallic lithium.

While the vast majority of lithium batteries shipped as cargo or carried aboard aircraft by passengers and crew members arrive at their destination safely, there have been numerous incidents involving overheating and fire aboard aircraft, including two fatal 747 cargo accidents with onboard fires that involved lithium batteries. Additionally, testing conducted by the FAA at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City has shown that fires involving lithium batteries represent a significant risk to aircraft. If a single battery in a shipment is defective, damaged, or improperly packaged, it can spontaneously catch fire. This fire will then spread to every battery in the shipment, resulting in what may well be an uncontrollable fire. Consignments of lithium batteries may also serve as fuel for an independent fire, greatly increasing the intensity and severity of that fire.

Because the risk of a single lithium battery in transportation is low, both the ICAO technical instructions and the Canadian dangerous goods regulations provide exceptions for the shipment of small quantities of consumer-sized lithium batteries. If a package contains fewer than two lithium ion cells, or eight batteries, it is exempted from the majority of dangerous goods provisions, including the requirement to place a dangerous goods label on the package, train the shipper, and notify the pilots that the shipment is aboard the aircraft. The threat to the aircraft, however, comes from the fact that the dangerous goods regulations stop at the package level. There is nothing to prevent a shipper from consolidating many packages containing eight or fewer cells on a single pallet, and nothing that prevents the operator from loading the entire aircraft with lithium batteries. In fact, there were approximately 80,000 to 90,000 lithium batteries aboard the cargo 747 that crashed in 2010 in Dubai, a situation that would still be allowed today.

There has been recent progress, however. In April of this year I represented IFALPA at an ICAO working group in Montreal tasked with considering the transportation of lithium metal batteries aboard passenger aircraft. Recognizing that halon is ineffective at suppressing a fire involving lithium metal batteries, the ICAO dangerous goods panel recommended that these batteries be prohibited as cargo aboard a passenger aircraft. If approved, this decision will take effect on January 1, 2015. This is a significant safety step, yet it does nothing to address lithium metal batteries on cargo aircraft, lithium metal batteries in equipment, or lithium ion batteries on any aircraft. ALPA therefore believes much more work needs to be done.

From a systems-safety perspective, the transportation of thousands of lithium batteries at a single location represents an unacceptable risk to the aircraft and its occupants. An effective safety management system involving dangerous goods would recognize the risk of large quantities of lithium batteries aboard an aircraft instead of focusing the regulations on the package level. Lithium batteries should be recognized as dangerous goods, packed in an appropriate manner, and loaded into a cargo compartment with fire suppression. Additionally, the quantity of batteries must be limited to that which will allow the suppression system to be effective.

In conclusion, ALPA believes Transport Canada should now take steps beyond those required by ICAO to ensure the promulgation of measures that will protect the public, flight crew members, and other individuals travelling on cargo aircraft and those involved in the air cargo transportation system from the hazards currently associated with the shipment of lithium batteries by air. This action is necessary for improving the overall safety of air cargo operations and the protection of lives and property whenever lithium batteries are moved through the air transportation system.

On behalf of ALPA's members, we would like to thank the committee members for the opportunity to appear before you today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you very much.

We'll now move to the Air Canada Pilots Association. We have Captain Craig Blandford and Captain Ed Bunoza.

Go ahead for 10 minutes or less, please.

[Captain Craig Blandford, President, Air Canada Pilots Association]

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and committee members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. We'll focus on SMS in the few short minutes we have.

I started flying when I was 15 years old in Newfoundland as a young air cadet. At the age of 18, I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was formally educated at the Royal Military College in Kingston. I flew for almost 20 years in the air force, and since 1998 I've flown with Air Canada as an airline pilot and airline captain. If you do all that math, that's about 38 years of experience, and I have a few good years left in me yet.

Captain Ed Bunoza is with me. Ed is the chair of our flight safety division at the Air Canada Pilots Association. Ed is also formally educated and has equal or superior experience to what I have. I'm also the president of the Air Canada Pilots Association and we're the largest professional pilot group in Canada. We represent more than 3,100 professional pilots who fly more than 35 million passengers around Canada and the world annually and safely, on Air Canada and Air Canada rouge, our new leisure carrier.

Our members work every day on the front lines of safety. This is what they do. This is their life and their livelihood. They eat and breathe safety every single day of the week. From them and through us, we can give you real-life experience with SMS. You asked us to review SMS and to make some recommendations for improvements, so we'll relate to you our experience in evaluating SMS, which we support in commercial aviation, given the benefit of the varied experience we have from bush flying and military flying, along with the experience of our pilots who've flown helicopters. We have varied backgrounds and experience levels. We'll make recommendations for changes and improvements, but of course, within a 10-minute time frame, we'll keep them very brief and focus on a few key points.

The first thing we'd like to recommend is that any and all lessons you learn from SMS should be transferred and carried across all modes of transportation. What we learn from aviation must be shared with rail and marine. I think it's very important that we do that.

As my friend and colleague Dan alluded to earlier, the very foundation of any SMS program has to be the creation of a solid safety culture. The very rock of an SMS program is creating that safety culture in your airline. Of course, the cornerstone of the safety culture is a voluntary, open, and non-punitive reporting system. We have to be able to report safety issues openly and freely. The users of the safety system must have trust in the system and confidence that they will not face retribution or punishment for reporting safety-related issues. Incidents of a deliberate nature, intentional actions, or professional negligence cannot hide behind safety. We would never ever support or condone that. There must be a mechanism to deal with those kinds of incidents, but that's beyond the scope of SMS and safety.

Currently, there's nothing in the regulations or system that protects the confidentiality of flight safety or air safety reports filed by pilots or other employees with their employer. ASRs can be and have been accessed through the Occupational Health and Safety Act. When the first incidents of that occurred, our pilots went into a hugely defensive posture and were very reluctant to continue reporting freely and openly, because they felt what they would report would be used in some other fashion. Loopholes need to be closed to prevent confidence in SMS from being eroded. Others want to use these reports for different non-safety-related purposes—in the courts for workers' compensation or for lawsuits. Of course, we can't permit that to happen or the very foundation of our culture will be eroded.

Loss of confidence will result in fewer reports and an inability to find and fix problems. Fulsome, open, and honest reporting is the best way to identify and then correct safety issues and problems.

Another source of reliable safety data is a flight data monitoring and a flight data analysis system, sometimes also referred to as FOQA . SMS programs are supposed to include an FDM program as well. FDM systems monitor and record flight data for review to identify systemic risks. This allows safety programs to identify trends in flight and address an issue before it actually turns into an incident.

We can give you lots of examples of how the flight data monitoring systems monitor all the parameters of a flight. For instance, you can monitor a routine flight into a specific runway in, say, Halifax; identify a potential issue; educate our members on the problem they're dealing with; and train in the simulator to prevent that from occurring again, all without ever having an incident using flight data analysis.

Currently under the law, under the regulations, there's no protection for that data either, similar to the case for ASRs. There should be a program, and there should be guidelines. It works at Air Canada. It works with Air Canada Pilots Association because of the tremendous flight safety relationship that's been developed with our employer. We're able to write our own regulations and our own protections for that kind of a system so that we're able to enhance our safety at Air Canada.

Of course another key component for SMS success is oversight, but not the way it was before, not within a culture of enforcement. We need a system that corrects problems when they're identified. Of course we know that the 2012 Auditor General's report found that Transport Canada was not sufficiently managing risks in civil aviation. We'll give you a very quick example: regulations to address pilot fatigue have been stalled at Transport Canada. We have a great relationship with the department, and they're working on this, but the regulations are still stalled in the bureaucracy a little bit. It's been 18 months since a panel of experts created a report and made recommendations. My friend Dan co-chaired and co-authored that report, and we're still waiting for some regulations with respect to flight and duty times, because fatigue is an issue that we've identified. Meanwhile the Americans and the European Union have advanced and created new regulations, and we're still lagging behind the rest of the world.

Transport Canada's oversight of SMS does not always meet the ICAO standards. ICAO requires a state authority to set acceptable levels of safety. ICAO requires an operator to have specific safety performance indicators and target values. ICAO requires audits and inspections at least once every 12 months.

Transport Canada, while still there and still providing some oversight, has managed to somehow replace or modify most of these things to some other standard that's acceptable to Transport Canada. Yet at Air Canada we have a very good SMS system. It works. It works because of the good relationship between the pilots and management, and among our employees, management, and the employer.

I've heard SMS explained as “managers manage safety, and employees deliver safety”. Well, I like to think that SMS is like a three-legged stool. You have the regulator; you have the operator; and you need stakeholders. In our case pilots are the employees. Input from the front-line stakeholders—in our case, pilots—is essential to the success of a good SMS program. When we have the stakeholders and the operator working together to develop a good safety program, we can often set our own standards. We can often monitor our own guidelines such that the regulator doesn't always have to be there. But there must be a resolution mechanism when we disagree on the resolution of a safety issue. Again, that's where the regulator and oversight from Transport Canada are essential, but they must be more sophisticated than the traditional model of inspections and enforcement. That has not worked in the past and it will not work again.

I have three main points to finish up and leave you with, if I may, Mr. Chairman.

We do remain concerned that Transport Canada is not adequately verifying regulatory compliance with SMS, especially for carriers or operators without organized labour, organized pilots or some way to provide feedback to the employer. We believe that lessons learned from SMS in aviation should be shared across all modes of transportation, and that the lessons learned by those airlines and operators with a more sophisticated SMS program should be de-identified and shared with those that are not as sophisticated so that they can also learn. Finally, the most important thing is a very solid safety culture. We believe any loopholes must be closed to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data reported through SMS. That is essential, and without those protections, reporting will stop and our safety culture will be eroded.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to the Air Transport Association of Canada with Mr. John McKenna and Mr. Michael Skrobica for 10 minutes or less, please.

[John McKenna, President and Chief Executive Officer, Air Transport Association of Canada]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen members of the committee. My name is John McKenna, and I am the president and chief executive officer for the Air Transport Association of Canada. I am accompanied today by Mr. Mike Skrobica, our senior vice-president and CFO.

The Air Transport Association of Canada has represented Canada’s commercial air transport industry for 80 years. We have approximately 180 members engaged in commercial aviation operating in every region of Canada and providing service to a large majority of the more than 600 airports in the country.

Our members include large airlines, regional airlines, commuter operators, air taxis, aviation educational organizations, and flights schools. Our membership also includes the air industry support sector involved in all aspects of the aviation support industry. We refer to them as Industry Partners.

We really appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to address the important aspects of our industry that you have undertaken to study. The transportation of dangerous goods is an area where the airline industry has been most progressive for a very long time due to the obvious potential adverse impact on airline operations.

I will focus my comments on safety management systems. However, I will gladly answer questions on either dangerous goods or SMS.

The implementation of SMS was to be facilitated by amendments to the Aeronautics Act. Bill C-6 and Bill C-7 were tabled respectively in 2006 and 2007. Key proposed amendments to the Aeronautics Act included the following: provisions to ensure employees of Canadian air carriers report safety concerns voluntarily without fear of legal or disciplinary actions, or what has been referred to as the non-punitive clause; provisions to allow for more self-regulation in low-risk areas of the Aeronautics Act, thus allowing the better use of Transport Canada resources for those areas of higher risk; additional tools for the Minister of Transport to ensure compliance; and increased penalties for contraventions.

The House of Commons was adjourned or prorogued before either of these two bills could be tabled for final reading. The amendments were on the table when the larger air carriers were involved in the collaborative development of Safety Management Systems and were supposed to help its implementation both at Transport Canada and with operators.

ATAC is convinced that SMS yields both a safety and financial return. It is, however, a considerable investment regardless of the size of the carrier's operations. Larger carriers designated as 705 operators in the Canadian air regulations tell us today that they wouldn't do without SMS, but all agree that they had underestimated the task at hand when they started its implementation.

In its 2012 watch list, the Transportation Safety Board showed that from 2001 to 2010 the 703 category—the air taxi operators—had incurred many more accidents and many more fatalities than the commuter operators—704—and the airline operators combined. During that decade, TSB numbers show that in the 703 category, 359 accidents resulted in 132 fatalities, whereas the commuter ops and the airline operators had reported 44 accidents and zero fatalities.

Canadian regulations mandating SMS have been in place since 2006, but so far only the 705 operators—the airlines—and the approved maintenance organizations that support them are obliged to implement a fully compliant SMS. ATAC wants to encourage and facilitate implementation of SMS for all commercial operators. We are very conscious of the fact that the SMS model that Transport Canada has approved for the 705 level is not reasonable for implementation by the smaller operators. In addition, the air transport industry has been getting mixed messages from within Transport Canada as to the future of full implementation of SMS throughout our industry.

Consequently, we have developed the ATAC SMS Tool Kit and Guide. This innovative tool, designed to help small and medium-sized operators develop, implement and maintain a compliant SMS, was distributed free of charge to all our members.

We spent over one year on the investigation into determining the type of appropriate SMS and subsequently developing the necessary tools and services required to help the small and medium-sized operators.

Our challenge was twofold. The first was to design an SMS model that would meet Transport Canada's requirements; the second was to come up with a model which would be accepted by the intended users that is commensurate with the size and complexity of their operations and that provides an operational and efficiency improvement.

Large organizations accumulate and report colossal volumes of complex data. Organizational size and complexity and cultural change challenges would make it difficult for these organizations to implement reactive and proactive SMS processes simultaneously. Smaller organizations need to efficiently identify and meet the needs of the regulatory requirements by clearly identifying safety critical information as being different from nice-to-know information. This ultimately reduces the complexity of many of the processes, procedures, and subsystems of an SMS. Not separating business goals from safety goals simplifies and supports the cultural change necessary for the good implementation of an SMS.

The risk management system is the procedural meat of an SMS. The organization's safety oversight system is its risk management system. It is made up of four distinct processes: reporting, investigation and analysis, corrective action development and implementation, and the measurement of effectiveness.

One must avoid confusing Transport Canada's responsibility for safety oversight with an organization's obligation to meet the safety oversight requirements of an SMS. While impossible to achieve in any organization, freedom from error is even more difficult to achieve in smaller organizations in Canada. They generally employ a wide spectrum of experienced personnel, from neophytes to experts, operate the least sophisticated and often older equipment, and operate in the least technically sophisticated and, therefore, potentially higher risk environment. Given this reality and TC's regulatory requirement to create an SMS commensurate with the size and complexity of an organization, the goal is to provide verifiable insurance that operations are safe.

I conclude by repeating that ATAC firmly believes that safety management systems offer both safety and a financial benefit. SMS must be a major element of any air carrier's corporate culture for SMS to be fully functional and yield the many benefits it offers. The key message from Transport Canada as to the implementation of SMS in all segments of the air transport industry must be clear. We at ATAC want to help operators welcome this vital element into their corporate culture and day-to-day operations.

Thank you.

A safety management system is not just a strategic document. It is the implementation of an even greater safety culture. The plan, and its supporting processes, is the way an organization sets itself up and runs its day-to-day operations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

We'll go right into questioning and to Mr. Mai for seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair. I'd like to thank all the witnesses for being here today.

Chair, there's an important issue that I'd like to address. I'd like to put forward an oral notice of motion. I'll read the motion, as follows:

That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), in view of the fact that previous members of the Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure, and Communities have asked to review any proposed regulatory changes, because the 2003 risk assessment has not been updated, and since critical documents including the 2001 Wokes report have not been made public, the Committee undertake a study on proposed flight attendant requirements by Transport Canada, which would allow Canadian airlines to reduce the number of flight attendants on flights, including the impacts of any regulatory change on the safety of passengers, particularly with regard to the “flip flop” rule which is an internationally unprecedented option; that every effort be made to ensure that the meetings be televised; and that the Committee report its results to the House of Commons.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for being here today.

I would like to talk about this issue. We have received representatives of the industry who spoke about changing the flight attendant ratio; they stated that that would have a direct impact on the safety management system.

What is your point of view on changing the flight attendant-passenger ratio? As you know, certain proposals would see the ratio change from one flight attendant for 50 passengers to one for 40. Do you have any opinion on that?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

Our views on the flight attendant ratio is that we defer to the aircraft manufacturers and the safety standards that have been set in the manufacture and the certification of aircraft. There's a process that the aircraft manufacturers follow to ensure that the proper number of assistants, of flight attendants or other folks, are on board for the evacuation of aircraft with specific guidelines and standards that are set by the regulators, whether it's Transport Canada, FAA, or any other around the world.

The other thing that we do know is that the ICAO standard is one to fifty. Most airlines around the world use the one to fifty rule. That's the only position that we take with respect to that.

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

Very well.

I would like to go back to what you said earlier. I think that this has in fact been mentioned by everyone today.

I am referring to the worry around reports prepared by employees. People fear there will be punitive action, or reprisals on the part of the employer when an employee, a pilot or other employee, raises security problems.

Do you have any concrete solutions to propose in that regard? This problem always seems to exist in the field. All of the employees do not feel secure; they are still afraid that there will be job repercussions if they raise security issues.

What type of concrete mechanism could you suggest? Why has the government still not acted on this? Is this something you have been asking for for a long time, even though no system has yet been put in place to protect employees?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

I apologize for responding in English, but I was born and raised in Newfoundland, and forgive me.

There are two issues. It's the actual reports and the culture of flight safety reports and incident reporting, that they must be used and used for safety only. As I emphasize, it is the very rock and culture of.... When I was a “baby” air force pilot, the very first thing I learned was that if I saw a problem, I reported it fully. As long as I'm not doing anything wrong, intentionally deliberate, or professionally negligent, the report will be used for safety and not for anything else.

So, we need to make sure there are regulations. You folks would know better than I where those regulations need to be, to prevent the misuse of those reports. We're not saying that they need to be hidden. We're not saying that people can't see them. But we would argue that only people who are trained, and who understand what they're looking at, should be allowed to see those reports that have been written, with complete and utter honesty, to help protect safety.

The second part of that is the flight data management. Right now, the amount of data we can collect from an airplane is incredible. I'll ask Ed to tell you about that in one second. We can create and produce a lot of data about flights—in flight, as they're landing, and all around. There is nothing; there are no regulations and no protections for that data. So, when I'm flying an airplane, if you want to collect data about how I have performed my duties on an airplane, especially in the event of an incident, that is not protected at all. The only protection we have is an agreement in our contract with our employer to use it for safety only. And I might add—

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

Maybe I'll have ALPA answer the question.

[Capt Dan Adamus]

Thank you.

We represent pilots from nine airlines in Canada, and there have been a number of instances where pilots have been disciplined after they've self-reported. To us, it's a cultural issue within the particular airline. We work with these airlines, and for the most part, it happens a couple of times. It doesn't happen after that. In extreme cases, we've had meetings with Transport Canada. We're not afraid to go to Transport, and Transport will pay particular attention to those particular operators, do an audit on their SMS, and ask some questions, if the procedures were followed properly.

That in itself has helped change the culture at some of these airlines, because, as Craig has said, if you can't report with confidence, knowing that you're not going to be disciplined, then the information flow stops.

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

Mr. McKenna, go ahead.

[John McKenna]

We had supported the proposed amendments to Bill C-6 and C-7, which in fact included protection of that sort of information for all companies, and would have seen that protection regulated by law, and not by the good will of the companies involved. These bills both died on the Order Paper, because the government was a minority government.

We totally support the fact that this information should be protected. There is information provided by employees, but there is also information related to the activities of a company, that can be accessible to competitors; for reasons other than security, we consider that that too should be protected.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay. Thank you.

We now move to Mr. McGuinty, for seven minutes.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, gentlemen.

Mr. Blandford, in your testimony you said that “a voluntary, open, and non-punitive reporting system” was instrumental and foundational to a successful SMS. Is that right?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

Absolutely, sir.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

So can you tell us what happened with your predecessor, Captain Paul Strachan?

[Capt Craig Blandford]

That's an open-ended question. What do you mean? Did something happen to him?

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Well, I've got something right here that says he was disciplined by Air Canada and threatened to be fired because of remarks on safety on CBC Television.

[Captain Ed Bunoza, Chair, Flight Safety Division, Air Canada Pilots Association]

You're mistaking it for two different things.

If you submit an air safety report at Air Canada you will not be disciplined. I've been the chair and the vice-chair for the last six years. I'm usually the guy who calls you first when something happens in the middle of the night. I go with you into the interviews. With Air Canada they have a very robust reporting system. If I write an air safety report, if I self-report, I will not be disciplined.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

But if you go on television and tell the Canadian public as the president of the union, the union chief, and you make a comment about an international company that is in receivership and that is responsible for servicing Air Canada aircraft, you can be subject to threats from the CEO of Air Canada?

[Capt Ed Bunoza]

I wasn't privy to what happened in that incident, so I can't—