Transport Committee on Dec. 4th, 2013

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

So anyone who states that your report concludes that Lac-Mégantic was preventable draws a conclusion you didn't make in your report. Is that correct?

[Michael Ferguson]

The audit was not an audit of the Lac-Mégantic accident, and we do not have any cause and effect in the audit between what we found and any accident that has occurred.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you.

I want to move on now to questions related to the audit you conducted, which we read about in chapter 7. You completed the audit on June 28, 2013. When did Transport Canada first learn of your intent to conduct this audit?

[Michael Ferguson]

We completed our field work in June. So it was probably about a year before that, probably the previous June, I would think.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

So you commenced your audit, then, in June 2012. That's what I understand you said.

[Michael Ferguson]

That would be about right. If you need precision, I would have to go back to find out for sure, but that would be about right.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Department responses are incorporated into the final report. When did Transport Canada receive a draft report to comment on?

[Michael Ferguson]

It would have been June 14, 2013.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, sir.

I want to move to Mr. Bourdon's testimony before this committee. On November 26, I asked Mr. Bourdon how many audits of safety management systems Transport Canada conducted every year. Mr. Bourdon in response said that he didn't have the precise number in front of him, but he said that it was between eight and twelve audits a year. Can your report confirm, at least for the audit period, that somewhere between nine and twelve audits were conducted per year?

[Régent Chouinard]

What we have in our report is that Transport Canada, for the three years ending in March 2012, had conducted fourteen. In the two years ending March 2012, eight audits were done in those two years.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Very good. I further asked how many federal railways had been audited for safety management systems. This testimony was given the day before your report was released. The answer was, “pretty much all of them, several times.”

Does your report substantiate that testimony?

[Régent Chouinard]

Mr. Chair, our report focused on two years. The report shows that in the two years we looked at for audits, there were eight of them, and in the three years ending in March, 26% of the railways were covered. If my numbers are right, that would be 8 railways out of the 31 in total were covered in the three years ending March 31, 2012.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I further asked departmental officials whether these were full-blown, system-wide audits or whether they were less than that. Let me see if I have the response. I think they confirmed that they were.... I don't have the testimony here. Let me just make sure I have this properly; I don't want to misquote this. I said, “Moving to system audits, [which would be] the next phase on top of traditional inspection....” Were these full-blown audits that looked at all of the 12 safety components? Or were they only focused audits on specific aspects of the safety management system?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time is over, so we'll let the witnesses answer that question and come back, Mr. Watson.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I didn't get the question out, but....

[Michael Ferguson]

I'm not exactly sure of the question, but the audits that we saw were audits of specific, known issues rather than audits of the overall safety management system of the federal railways. And we also found that the scope of the audits was limited. So we had concerns about how the audits were conducted.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

With that, I understand you're going to take the next seven minutes, Mr. Watson, so it's back to you and you can continue your questioning.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to move to the “Stronger Ties” report. You referenced it in your report when speaking about recommendations that were made. Page 73 of that report talks about an evaluation tool for safety culture. They use an ICAO scale for the rail companies that moves from one being an only rules-based compliance regime to full implementation of SMS at stage five, and that report ranked the railway companies that it examined on that scale. It also used the same scale to evaluate Transport Canada's performance, one being that Transport Canada would have only a rules-based, inspection for compliance regime all the way to a full implementation of SMS, which would be an audit and monitoring system. They gave a ranking of three, and that was seven years after amendments were brought into implement safety management systems.

Your work points out some deficiencies. Using the same scale, has Transport Canada moved beyond the ranking of three or would you say that after six years since “Stronger Ties”, they may not have moved from that standard?

[Michael Ferguson]

Certainly, Mr. Chair, I can't try to rate where they are using somebody else's scale; that's not what we've done. In the panel report in 2007 we identified, in paragraph 21 of our report, that there were 56 recommendations and we have a few to rank them on the scale you're referring to.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Okay.

I have a question, on page 19 of your report, in paragraph 7.34, it says:

When implemented and maintained adequately, safety management systems provide assurance that a railway’s operations are functioning safely on a day-to-day basis, or continuously improved when hazards or risks are identified.

Is that your view of safety management systems? Is that a qualitative assessment that safety management systems, if done right, are safe and the way to go?

[Michael Ferguson]

That's a statement of the goal of safety management systems. That's what the intent of using a safety management system is. We did not assess safety management systems as an approach, in general.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Regarding the CN/CP audits that were done, the audits of their safety management systems completed by Transport Canada, I believe you said that some eight out of fourteen audits were done on the two companies. Is there enough evidence at Transport Canada, based on those SMS audits, that CN and CP have functional SMS systems?

[Michael Ferguson]

I can't speak to the results related to any one company. Our results in the audit were looking overall at what Transport Canada does to oversee the implementation of safety management systems across all of the federal railway companies. Again, on an overall basis, we identified that there are many places where they need to improve how they're conducting those audits, but I can't speak to any one company on its own.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

You did a pretty comprehensive overview of the regulatory framework in addition to safety management systems, and certainly the history of it. When you talked about all of the developments in it, what I didn't notice included was whether you are able to tell us if any rules or regulations were rescinded during the same timeframe you studied the additions that were made to it.

[Michael Ferguson]

That wasn't the focus of the audit so I can't speak to that.