Thank you.
Madam Chair, distinguished committee, we're honoured to be invited by the chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities to appear before your committee today as a representative of the Community Alliance for Air Safety.
The Community Alliance for Air Safety represents more than 40 communities and more than 45,000 people. Our focus is to ensure the safe operations and responsible growth of Toronto's Pearson International Airport and other airports across Canada.
Since our formation about a year ago, we've engaged with most of the operational stakeholders, including pilots, airport unions, industry experts, the airlines, the GTAA and Nav Canada. In the past year we've also engaged with several key government stakeholders including the GTA caucus, Transport Canada and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. After more than a year of effort, we are encouraged that Transport Canada has recently accepted our invitation to engage in a collaborative discussion on the concerns of the communities that we represent.
We completed our first face-to-face discussion with Transport Canada a few weeks ago and raised three areas of concern. We believe this summary highlights the core of our concerns and we're going to use these as the basis of our introduction today.
The first one is that Transport Canada has been challenged to do more with less in the last 15 to 20 years as a result of available funding. We ask Transport Canada how they're going to bridge this gap between their budget constraints and the objective oversight of the airports across Canada.
The second one, further to the point above, is that Transport Canada has now started to move the responsibility of operational compliance to their operators. This trend is called self-regulation. This is concerning as CAAS is not sure how clear, objective oversight can be achieved when the operator such as the airport, the airlines and Nav Canada are checking themselves. Recent press has highlighted the issue and has included statistics about the lack of effectiveness of this self-regulation model.
The third one is the transparency of Transport Canada's approval process and oversight. We have a few examples. CAAS has requested regular public disclosure of data regarding enforcement of penalties and rule violations. We've received some limited data but we still believe there are significant gaps with the violations that are happening today and what's being enforced. There continues to be no commitment from Transport Canada to publish and discuss this data on a regular basis in a public forum.
We have a few other examples that we've shared in the transcript.
A key point is that the significant growth is concerning us on a number of fronts. At today's volume, the airport experiences a significant number of safety issues annually. As previously stated, the self-regulation model is simply not effective in creating meaningful accountability to ensure these safety issues are reported and resolved.
Second, the current footprint of the GTAA is landlocked on all four sides, which means the growth in traffic is limited to the same size airport. There is simply no physical room to grow.
Third, Transport Canada stated in 1990 that the GTAA is at capacity. The operational density at the airport is at an all-time high. CAAS's view is that if the GTAA continues to grow as quickly as possible to 90 million passengers, we will have planes landing every 15 seconds. This will introduce a significant level of higher risk operationally. We believe that has not been appropriately evaluated. It's definitely not been addressed with the public. We've raised this issue on many occasions. Transport Canada is the only organization in Canada that has full responsibility and full authority to ensure that these critical issues are acknowledged.
In summary, we're honoured that CAAS has been invited to share these concerns with the committee. CAAS is committed to continuing regular discussions with all stakeholders to ensure that the safety and well-being of all those who work and live in close proximity to any airport in Canada are respected. In the end, we're here to ensure that all key stakeholders keep safety top of mind when all decisions are being made regarding the past or future Canadian transport policies or procedures.
We hope we can add to this discussion. We welcome any questions.