Transport Committee on April 9th, 2019

[Ken Hardie, Liberal, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

It's difficult for sure. Thank you.

I'm going to turn over the rest of my time to Mr. Rogers.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here today, Jason by video, and Scott.

Scott, I know your busing system; you've been transporting school children to events across the province. From your perspective, what are the challenges you would see in requiring all school buses, or any buses, to have seat belts for the children you transport?

[Scott Parsons]

One of the things we see in our area is that all school routes are double routes, and you have a limited time to operate those routes. When a school bus gets to the end of one school route, it has to turn around and go back to the end of the district and start a second route. Time is of the essence.

There are areas in St. John's where a bus can do a loop quite quickly. In my view, Mr. Rogers, I think compartmentalization has been a resounding success when the speed of the bus doesn't exceed 50 kilometres an hour.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

Beyond that...?

[Scott Parsons]

The thing about a low-speed bus is there's less chance of a bus being involved in a rollover where children are being tossed around inside the bus. If anything happens, it's probably going to be a frontal impact where the children will come ahead and compartmentalization will contain the children.

In an issue of Bus & Motor Coach News there was an operator in the United States that actually fitted seats with two-point seat belts and it was involved in a collision. Children who weren't strapped in survived and children who were strapped in were killed because of the upper body trauma caused by the seat belts. We have to be careful with that.

Over 50 kilometres an hour on secondary highways where the speed is accelerated to 80 to 90 kilometres per hour, I think the kids should be strapped in and they should be three-point belts.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers.

We'll go to Mr. Aubin.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for joining us.

Since the launch of our study on the possibility of equipping buses with seatbelts, I would say that the discourse has changed, especially after Minister Garneau posted a tweet on April 6. I'll read it to you, in case you missed it:

Our thoughts continue to be with the families of those who lost their lives in the Humboldt bus crash. We've taken measures to require new large & medium size intercity buses to be equipped with seatbelts.

Given this tweet, it seems that the minister's approach is clear and that his decision has been made. All new buses will be equipped with seatbelts. Since the issue is no longer being raised for new buses, we must now focus on the transition.

How can companies such as yours, which probably already operate a number of buses without seatbelts, make this transition? I suppose that passengers who are aware of this new standard or this desire expressed by the minister will prefer to board a bus equipped with seatbelts.

How much would it cost to convert a bus that doesn't have seatbelts to a bus that meets the standards? How many years would it take to convert your respective fleets?

Mr. Parsons, let's start with you.

[Scott Parsons]

I don't know the answer to that question. I can give an opinion.

I have been in the school bus business and have been fixing them for over 47 years. I've seen the best and the worst. I remember when my dad started in the business. He rolled the chassis out from under the body and replaced the chassis to get another service life out of the body of the bus. That can't happen today. Manufacturers have reduced the wall thickness of the bodies and they've made the buses lighter. The chassis are lighter. It's interesting after a few years on the road, to put 63 high school students in a school bus and go out on Foxtrap Access Road and look in the mirror and watch the seats of the bus doing this as the bus is going down the road. The body of the bus today is made so light that it can't take the punishment that it did back in the 1950s and 1960s.

I can't see that it's possible to retrofit a school bus.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Parsons.

Mr. Roberts, what do you think?

[Jason Roberts]

I have that opinion. Many of our provinces have a lifespan on coaches. In Newfoundland we have 12 years. There's a new bus this year, so if this happens two years from now, maybe with your 10-year integration plan everything will have evolved in time, so we'll be there.

Again, I agree with Mr. Parsons about the school bus that it's not feasible to get something that's at mid-life and do it. Motorcoaches are a little bit different again. Motorcoaches have different bodies and different lifespans. Most of them are stainless steel and fibreglass. It has a forever ongoing lifespan when it comes to the actual structure of the unit. I think it can be feasible to do this with motorcoaches going back to a certain year, providing someone is going to guarantee it, and the manufacturer is going to state that it meets the standard of what a three-point seat belt should be. For our fleet now, I think I might have two left that don't have seat belts. I have four 2019s. They all have seat belts. Everything since 2013 has had seat belts.

One of the things I will mention, as Mr. Parsons mentioned also, is Prevost. Since 2013, it's been mandatory...they won't manufacture a coach without seat belts. I think it's a liability thing. It's good to know that when you buy a coach, between me and you, I think that....

Go ahead.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

I have a quick question, since I don't have much time left.

I fully understand the potential difficulties involved in this transition, especially for school buses. It seems that these vehicles will need to meet new safety standards. As a result, should school buses that can't be modified be prohibited from travelling at high speed? I'm thinking of school buses that travel at 90 kilometres an hour on highways during extracurricular activities. Do the buses pose a greater risk under these circumstances? Should we insist that these buses use only secondary roads?

[Jason Roberts]

I agree with you 100%. Normally, it comes down to how a lot of the schools and the school districts are looking for a cheaper way to travel. If they're going on a ski trip, they will take a school bus versus taking a coach because, of course, a coach is going to cost them more coin. It's on a highway. They're on a highway in winter conditions, in a school bus. They're playing a different game. It's much more risky.

Of course, for me, whenever I have a coach available, I'll send a coach, for my comfort zone, knowing I have a coach on the road, not a school bus—for the same cost.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much. We still have a few minutes if there are some additional questions from the committee members.

Mr. Rogers.

[Churence Rogers, Liberal, Bonavista—Burin—Trinity, NL]

I just want to ask Mr. Roberts a question. You talked about it at the beginning of your presentation. You really focused on driver training, driver competence as a big factor in terms of how you're maintaining your safety record. You talked about how your buses travel over long stretches at high speeds, particularly in Newfoundland and Labrador, with some of the winter weather conditions and so on. What do you think is the best possible thing the government could do to ensure safe or safer bus travel? Are things being done to the national standards that Scott talked about? Are things being done at this stage that you see as enough? What else should government be doing?

[Jason Roberts]

Mr. Rogers, I don't know if there's really a lot you can do. The regulation of what's required, maybe for passenger transportation, is something I've talked about. You get a class 2 licence for Newfoundland and that allows you to operate a motorcoach or a school bus. If you're going on the highway, if you're doing higher speeds, if you're doing more intersections, I think there should be a certain amount of experience that's needed. I know that the new training out west is going, to my thinking, to 120 hours of service before you can actually obtain a full permit.

I think that a lot of it comes back to us as the carriers to know the background, to know the people, to know where they are. We're very compliant with alcohol and drug programs. We're doing all that. I think weather is a big factor in a lot of this for motorcoach safety; and unfortunately, Humboldt was probably not in one of those situations. To me, with the weather conditions, it should be someone who can know when to say when. At the next stop, if the conditions are too bad, stop.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you. Mr. Sikand has a question. It's okay. We still have five minutes on the clock if anybody has any further short questions they'd like to get some answers to.

Mr. Sikand.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Parsons, I completely agree with what you said in your opening statement. My only concern is that since coaches and buses operate interprovincially, due to the divisions of power, there's a lot of legislation that is provincial and not federal. How do you incentivize the manufacturers to take this up and make the changes? There are dollar amounts associated with the retrofits and the seat belts. How do we incentivize the manufacturers?

[Scott Parsons]

I don't know how to answer that question; I really don't.

I know when the idea of seat belts came around, MCI started building their frames sturdier in 2003. I think, from unit number 68-300, Prevost can retrofit a bus with three-point seat belts quite easily. They just remove the old seats and put in the new seats with the three-point belts. Before that, they'd have to take the rail out of the floor, cut a piece of plywood from the bottom and strengthen the frame. The interior walls would have had to be removed, at a cost of $82,000 per unit. I know, because I just had some buses that I wanted to send away to have it done, and I couldn't afford it. It puts a little bit of pressure on us.

What we've been doing to help ourselves deal with this is to make sure our drivers are very well trained. Our driver training with our company exceeds the norm by a long shot. Every pay period, if time sheets are handed in, drivers go inside and we talk about safety. We have committees within our organization that deal with risk and try to manage it as much as we can. Every one of our employees is charged with safety and making sure the operation is safe. The best way to manage that is to not be involved in an accident where seat belts would be required to save lives. We make sure we don't put ourselves in that position, as much as we can.

This is why I go back to dealing with the way that signage is put on ramps and the ways that guardrails and approaches to rivers and bridges are probably not adequate in some areas. At rock outcroppings with no guardrails, if drivers are inattentive for two seconds and lose the shoulder of the road, they hit a rock outcropping in our province; it's not like Saskatchewan. We have dangers in our province that are out of the norm. We deal with that internally. We constantly look inward. We self-analyze.

I think that's what we're doing here today. How we're doing...I think it's working.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

In a minute or two we'll go.

Mr. Jeneroux.

[Matt Jeneroux, Conservative, Edmonton Riverbend, AB]

Madam Chair, I thought we gave some time.

I think because this motion was moved by the Liberal government House leader.... We certainly take our votes seriously. We would like to get there in enough time to make sure we're voting accordingly.

I think it's unfortunate that we have to cut these guys off, as they're both bringing a lot of value to this committee.

I would suggest respectfully that we leave the committee now to get to our votes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

All right.

Mr. Roberts and Mr. Parsons, thank you very much for your testimony. It was extremely important. If you have anything in addition that you want to submit to the committee, please send it in to the clerk. We would certainly receive it very well.

Thank you both for what you do. Thank you for trying to keep our children safe, especially.

We will suspend. We will return to our next panel after the vote.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We'll call the meeting back to order.

On this part of our meeting, from Motor Coach Canada, we have Doug Switzer, president and chief executive officer, Ontario Motor Coach Association; and from Motor Coach Industries, we have John-Paul Pelletier, vice-president, engineering, by video conference. For Teamsters Canada, we have Phil Benson.

Welcome to all of you. We appreciate your being here.

Mr. Switzer, would you like to lead off, please, for five minutes only.

[Doug Switzer, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ontario Motor Coach Association, Motor Coach Canada]

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important dialogue around motorcoach safety.

At the outset, I think it's important to remind ourselves that on the whole, motorcoaches are the safest mode of surface transportation, and second only to airlines in incidents per distance travelled.

That being said, no means of travel, in fact one could argue no human activity is ever perfectly safe. No matter how good your record, there is always more that can be done.

One thing I have learned about safety in over 20 years' experience in both government and industry is that there is no such thing as “safe”. There is no magic end point; you're never done and there is always something more that you can do next.

Briefly, these are the areas where industry and government can work together now to have the greatest impact on improving motorcoach safety: increasing seat belt use, finally moving forward on electronic logs, improving enforcement, and doing a better job of collecting and analyzing motorcoach safety data. I look forward to discussing these points further during your questions

There has been a lot of talk about seat belts lately. First, with regard to seat belts, let me be clear that the industry unequivocally supports them. We have been calling for a federal manufacturing standard and requirement for over a decade, lobbying which has, frankly, been largely ignored.

But despite the lack of interest by governments, around 2009, the industry and manufacturers moved to make seat belts standard equipment even without a regulatory mandate. And so, for almost the past decade, most new buses have come with three-point belts installed, although there are noticeable exceptions due to the lack of manufacturing requirement. We are moving forward as quickly as possible to ensure all coaches are equipped with belts, but because the lifespan of a motorcoach is 18 to 20 years—and I think that question came up earlier—it will still take a few more years before we get 100% adoption.

With respect to retrofitting, it's complicated and possibly dangerous if done incorrectly, and there was a bit of discussion with the previous panel about that. It's not as simple as just changing the seats, or worse, just adding belts on to existing seats. To be done properly, you need to anchor the seat to the body of the coach, which usually requires the coach to be ripped open and modified, potentially changing the structure of the coach, depending on how old the coach is and what it was originally manufactured with. And if the belts are improperly installed, they are a much greater safety risk than no belts at all because the belts themselves can become the safety hazard. It is frankly a difficult option for most coaches, unfortunately.

There is also an important issue regarding provincial laws creating driver liability for ensuring minors wear belts. Despite CCMTA agreeing many years ago that the provinces needed to remove the liability for bus drivers, only Quebec has done anything about it. The issue here is that the liability exists only if the coach has belts. If there are no belts, there is no liability. Thus it's been a very real disincentive for operators to install belts—a disincentive that most have ignored, but not all. This needs to be addressed.

But at the end of the day, the fact that a majority of coaches now have three-point belts means that given the very low usage rate, that's really where the problem lies. This is one area where we could all do a better job by getting people to wear their belts. We don't need a new law, as some have suggested. It's already the law in all provinces that you have to wear a belt if you're on a moving vehicle. It's just not enforced and it's not culturally done. So, we as an industry are looking at what we can do to increase usage.

Improving coach safety, however, goes beyond simply the issue of seat belt use.

We need the government to get on with mandating electronic logging devices, ELDs. Again, the industry has supported making these mandatory for some time. We accepted grudgingly that the Canadian government would not act until it saw what the U.S. government did for the sake of harmonization. But the U.S. law was announced years ago and has been in effect since 2017, yet we still don't have a clear path forward on Canadian regulations.

The existing “hours of service” regulations are adequate, and while some will pick at the details, liking this aspect and wanting to change that, remember that the current rules are the result of years of consultation, study and debate. They were not arrived at lightly, and there's no evidence that the rules themselves contribute to fatigue. But cheating does. And that's why we need ELDs now to make sure that drivers don't exceed the regulations.

And speaking of better enforcement of existing rules, little or nothing ever seems to happen to get unscrupulous operators off the road. For the most part, the safety regulatory regime is in fact sound. We have enough laws, but what we need is better targeted enforcement at the provincial level on those bad actors who ignore the good laws.

Finally, one of the frustrations that I think everyone trying to improve motor coach safety experiences is trying to find accurate motorcoach safety stats. In most road safety stats, we are categorized as commercial vehicles, lumping us in with trucks; or we are deemed buses, but that includes transit vehicles and school buses. Transport Canada and the provinces need to break out and make available the specific collision data for motorcoaches so that we can all do a better job of understanding the trends and the real causes of fatalities and injuries. Then we can all figure out what the next step forward is, because there should always be a next step forward.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

We will go on to Mr. Pelletier, by video conference.

[John-Paul Pelletier, Vice-President, Engineering and Quality, Motor Coach Industries]

Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee on bus passenger safety.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to join the committee to speak on bus passenger safety. New Flyer Industries on the transit bus side and Motor Coach Industries of the coach business, both members of the New Flyer Group based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, value passenger safety as our highest priority.

Motor Coach Industries is committed to working with the motorcoach industry stakeholders to make its vehicles as safe as reasonably possible. This includes working with motorcoach operators, key industry associations, regulators and government, both in Canada and the United States, including Transport Canada, the Transportation Safety Board, NHTSA, the NTSB and the FMCSA.

Bus and motorcoach travel remains among the safest modes of transportation. Studies have been published along with data collected annually by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in the U.S. supporting this.

MCI has a history of implementing safety systems and working regulators in both the U.S. and Canada. When proven reliable and fit for service, MCI has implemented new technologies and collaborated with regulatory bodies on proposed and final rule making. All MCI motorcoaches are designed with an integrated semi-monocoque stainless steel and high-strength steel structure for safety, reliability and corrosion resistance.

Some examples of the safety systems and technologies that have been made standard on MCI coaches include high-mount stop lights; laminated side glazing; electronic stability control, going back to 2008; automatic traction control, going back to 2008; fire suppression, going back to 2009; tire pressure monitoring, going back to 2009; and digital wheel end monitoring, going back to 2010.

Some additional safety systems that we've made available on coaches include seat belts, going back to late 2008 and becoming standard on MCI coaches in 2016; forward collision warning, collision mitigation and adaptive cruise control in 2015; and then, finally, enhanced advanced emergency braking and lane departure warning in late 2018, as well as 360° bird's-eye view cameras in 2016.

There are also several recent regulations that will positively impact the overall safety of motorcoaches by improving both occupant and driver safety. These include requiring seat belts on coaches in the United States in November 2016, and then in Canada in 2020; electronic stability control in June 2018 in the United States, and then also coming to Canada; as well as the electronic logging devices made standard in December 2017 in the United States.

Advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous vehicles and connected vehicles are advancing rapidly in the automotive and commercial vehicle spaces. The development of passive ADAS currently available is significant for occupant and vehicle safety. It includes adaptive cruise control, forward collision warning, collision mitigation with advanced emergency braking, traffic sign recognition and overspeed alerts, as well as lane departure warning.

There is continued development needed for both passive and active driver assistance systems, which include pedestrian and object detection warning, driver fatigue and drowsy driver systems, lane-keeping assist, automatic lane changing and lane-change assist, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, as well as the journey to levels 2, 3 and 4 automated driving.

While bus and motorcoach travel remain among the safest modes of transportation, the industry needs to continue to enhance passenger safety by collaborating with its key stakeholders, including regulators and government, in both Canada and the United States, including Transport Canada and the United States Department of Transportation; vehicle manufacturers and our key supplier partners; vehicle owners and operators; and industry associations such as the OMCA, the American Bus Association, the United Motorcoach Association and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

I would like to thank you again for the opportunity to present to the committee, and I look forward to your questions.