Transport Committee on June 12th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You have a minute and a half if somebody....

Mr. Watson.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

That's fine.

The process of consultation was raised with regard to the aviation sector. I wonder if you could clarify something. As I understand it, CARAC is the body with which you undertake consultation about potential emerging issues or regulatory issues. As I understand it, there are a lot of stakeholders. Perhaps you could tell us about how many stakeholders could potentially be consulted with respect to aviation. I think the number is in the hundreds. I understand it has always had to go to a full plenary, whether it's for a minor issue or a major issue. Of course you can see how that would be a very time-consuming process.

Can you talk about the triage that is done now to streamline the process? What stakeholders do you go to with certain issues as opposed to a plenary issue?

[Laureen Kinney]

One of the recommendations dealt with this issue in terms of how to make our process faster. This was a considerable focus of attention in 2012, for example. We looked at how the consultation process had become, as you say, somewhat formalized and process heavy, if you will. You typically have more than 500 participants, particularly at a plenary session, and the question is whether all of those participants actually have a key interest in the issue. We were trying to make sure that everybody who was possibly going to be affected could make sure to contribute so that we didn't have regulations going forward with unintended consequences. But the process was heavy.

Particularly in light of a couple of Transportation Safety Board recommendations regarding Cougar Helicopters' offshore operations or float plane operations, areas in which there's a very specific and fairly limited user community that would be affected by these recommendations, we developed a way of triaging the incoming recommendation or issue that we'd be moving on—it might come from our own observations of a safety concern—and determining how it could be looked at in terms of moving through the broader process in a more targeted way.

Something called a PICA, procedures for inventory control afloat, was developed, a process, which I won't go into, that also uses a workshop approach. We bring together those key core people on certainly a very focused area of safety and we have that workshop to say, “Here's the safety issue. Here's the Transportation Safety Board recommendation. Here's our technical information. You give us what your operational experiences are. If we proposed to do this, how would that work? What problems would it cause?” Then we can take that and we can move it through an accelerated review process of the broader community instead of spending a length of time at that big committee on an issue that really has little relevance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Komarnicki, go ahead for five minutes.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I just want to follow up somewhat on the questions and comments from Mr. Toet.

We're looking at definitions and at how there may be some issues with those. We talked about program validation inspections. We talked about audits, primarily related to the safety management system, SMS. There's a term that's been used consistently—traditional inspection—and I would take that to relate to something other than SMS, perhaps in relation to the regulations themselves.

Can you tell us what traditional inspections actually mean? Do they still exist, and are they done the same way now as they have been in the past?

[Laureen Kinney]

The category that we call process inspections and the general category of inspections cover the kinds of traditional inspection activities, if you will. Now that's probably not a very good reference in the sense of what period was traditional—five years ago, ten years ago, etc.—but generally speaking, it covered the areas where an inspector would visit a site of an aircraft company or an air carrier or perhaps a ramp inspection at an airport. That inspector would intervene with several aircraft perhaps from different companies.

It was basically an on-scene review of what was there at the time, a moment-in-time snapshot, if you will. Some of the issues that were raised from that were the lack of documentation and whether that was the most effective way to find the issues we were looking for. Statistically, there's obviously a question as to whether that's—

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Wouldn't part of that include whether or not the carrier is complying with the regulations?

[Laureen Kinney]

Yes, it would.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Are those traditional-type inspections, as we sort of defined them, still being carried out today, as we speak?

[Laureen Kinney]

Yes, they are part of the kinds of process inspections that do go on, but they have been modernized and given additional rigour. They generally occur on a planned basis, so that it's not a random individual going to different places through the week.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

The member for Trinity—Spadina had a question that she wanted answered with regard to air safety. How many inspections were done from 2004 to 2011, broken down by audits, traditional inspection, and process validation inspections? She was focusing on the traditional inspection. For 2010-11 the traditional inspections, as I understand they are now defined, was 13,664. Would that number encompass the kind of traditional inspections we just talked about? How many of them would have been pre-announced compared to those that were not announced?

[Martin Eley]

The inspections are done in two key areas. There is the plan surveillance work, but companies are evolving all the time. As they extend their operations and introduce new technology, new aircraft, or whatever it happens to be, we get involved in doing inspections when we certify them initially. So those are opportunities where we look at a lot of the detail and the context.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Let's not talk about those. Let's talk about traditional inspections dealing with regulation specifically, those that are actually announced and those that aren't. Are you able to give an answer to that?

[Martin Eley]

No, I think the comment we made earlier was that we don't have the announced ones categorized that way. We have information on what inspections were done, but not necessarily whether they were announced or not.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Would it be a good number of unannounced traditional inspections?

[Laureen Kinney]

I can say they do occur. There are a number of areas where they are particularly useful. Say, for example, right now we have an agreement with EASA, which is the European safety authority, and under that agreement there will be sharing of inspection data. All of the inspections that will go on under that category of inspections will be unannounced. That's the way that system works. There are others going on.

If I may give you an example, if a strike activity or some financial problem occurs in a company, we would go in and do that kind of inspection unannounced to check and see what's going on with the company and if there are safety factors.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

The advantages of unannounced versus announced are along the lines you have discussed. Is there any other reason that you might want an unannounced inspection?

[Laureen Kinney]

Well, I think it's fair to say there's an assumption that there is a deterrence effect and certainly that's a possibility. You would have to look again at the rationale for how we look at things from a scientifically statistically valid basis. If you assume that an unannounced inspection might catch things that you wouldn't otherwise find, then you'd have to assume that you're going to actually be able to be effective enough to see all of those things and that, by walking in and looking at things, you are going to see those kinds of things. I'm not sure there's any clear link on that, but we do agree that unannounced inspections are appropriate, and they are used where they are useful.

I will just distinguish that unannounced is very different from unplanned. We don't see a lot of use normally for unplanned inspections, because we should use our effective resources where they are best useful.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Eley, do you have a comment?

[Martin Eley]

If we have a concern about a company because of perhaps a PVI, and we're concerned about its ability to actually fix things, we will move into enhanced monitoring, and that is a much more flexible thing, where we would tend to use unannounced inspections to make sure it's on track, and it either gets on track or we step up our enforcement action. They are very much part of that toolbox.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Ms. Kinney, just as clarification, you made a comment in regard to not spontaneous inspections but random checks. You said “where appropriate” or something like that. Could you expand a little on that, if you wouldn't mind?

[Laureen Kinney]

What we do is we set a national risk-based inspection cycle for the program validation inspections. Those are implemented on a planned basis, cyclically. Those are the big inspections that cover a lot of elements of a company.

Then we have triggers for a whole series of other kinds of process inspections and other types of inspections, some of which are similar to the traditional inspections. Of those other types of activities, some are unannounced. But again, that's something that...whether it's appropriate to the particular decision at the point in time of making the plan between the manager and the inspector to go out and do an inspection. There may be a reason to do this unannounced.

I just was making the point that typically these would be generally a plan in the sense that you have a national annual plan, then you break that down into weekly and monthly plans at the inspector level, and the managers do a little bit of planning around that. I just wanted to make sure that people were clear that we don't necessarily see a lot of reason for unplanned inspections, but sometimes you use unannounced.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks for clarifying that.

Another point I want to bring up is in relation to a question that Ms. Morin asked, about how many seconds it takes per bag. I can understand how that would be almost impossible to answer. I'm under the assumption that, as a passenger, if I check luggage, it all goes through some kind of a scanner. Is that correct?

[Laureen Kinney]

Yes, that's right.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Would that be very similar to any other airport in the country or in the world?