I'll try to make it better by lifting the handset.
I just described the experience of one of the employees on board one of the vessels in the pilot project. Another company, North Arm Transportation, had a complete change in its approach to its safety culture. That is most significant for them, since they were one of the companies that had previously implemented ISM.
A third company advised me that, at the beginning of the project, it had been having a lot of small accidents on board its vessels. It was having warnings from its insurance companies and its underwriters that it might not be able to have insurance coverage in the future. It went from that to getting a discount on its insurance from its underwriter, two years later.
A testament to the project was that all five companies continue to this day[Inaudible—Editor] and enhance their safety management systems, even though there is no obligation by law for them to do so. They've all seen safety, efficiency, and financial gains as a result of that.
At the end of the project, we had a meeting with Transport Canada and discussed the project and the outcome with all the companies. We proposed at the end that all commercial vessels in Canada, regardless of size or area of operations, should have an appropriate safety management program in place.
I stress the word appropriate. It is no good trying to force the veritable round peg into a square hole. I think it's more like trying to get a round peg into a triangular hole, which is even more difficult. By that I mean trying to put in place, for instance, the international system and have that in place on a small, two-person towboat running on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It has to be an appropriate system that is tailored to the size of the company, the size of the vessel, and the operations of that vessel.
I'd like to point out that both the Canadian Transportation Safety Board and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board fully support the establishment and the operation of safety management systems. They see them as critical safety measures.
Unfortunately Transport Canada chose not to require all commercial vessels to implement SMS but have moved to a three-tiered approach where SMS is voluntary for smaller vessels and not monitored by Transport Canada. I don't think having a voluntary system would be as effective as having one that is audited. We did propose to Transport Canada a small vessel compliance program based on our pilot project; however Transport Canada did not see fit to implement it. It put into place since then, though, an alternate service delivery program whereby classification societies perform both approval and inspection services on the government's behalf, and they're authorized by Transport Canada to do—