Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and members of the committee. I want to thank you for inviting the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to appear today.
I bring with me two colleagues who bring a wealth of experience. To my right is Mr. Jean Laporte, chief operating officer, and to my left is Mr. Kirby Jang, the director of rail and pipeline investigations.
Given the shorter period of time scheduled for today's appearance, we thought it would be more efficient to submit our original, longer, preliminary remarks that deal with who we are and what we do in advance. I hope that's been distributed.
What I'd like to do now is briefly outline some updates.
The most powerful tool that the Transportation Safety Board of Canada has to advance transportation safety is through our recommendations to regulators and the industry in significant cases where we've identified a serious systemic risk that is not being adequately mitigated.
These recommendations are our highest level of communication and they carry significant weight. Under the CTAISB Act, the relevant minister has 90 days to respond as to if and how the department intends to address it.
Since it was established in 1990, the Transportation Safety Board has published 144 recommendations to improve rail safety. The TSB has not lost sight of any of them. We assess the initial responses and follow up. We also re-assess every year until we feel enough progress has been made that the risk has either been eliminated or else substantially reduced.
It may take time, but over the years we have a good track record of success. Of these 144 rail recommendations, the responses to 126, or almost 88%, have been assessed by the board as being fully satisfactory.
We currently have 18 outstanding rail recommendations requiring action by the regulator and the industry. We've recently completed and published our annual reassessments of most of these. These touch on everything from fencing along railways to reduce opportunities for trespassing, to the implementation of physical defences to mitigate against human error and following signal indications, and, of course, those coming out of our Lac Mégantic investigation, to name a few.
However, sometimes it takes Transport Canada a very long time to implement our recommendations. For example, in 2001, the board issued a recommendation to Transport Canada to “expedite the promulgation of new grade crossing regulations”, something the department had already been working on for over 10 years at that point. It wasn't until late 2014 that the new grade crossing regulations were implemented.
That's why, a few years ago, the TSB produced a safety watchlist, highlighting those issue we feel pose the greatest risk to Canada' s transportation system.
Currently there are four rail issues on the TSB watch-list. These are railway crossing safety, the transportation of flammable liquids by rail, following railway signal indications, and on-board voice and video recorders.
There's also a fifth issue that affects not just rail, but also other transportation modes, including marine and aviation, and that is the issue of safety management and regulatory oversight.
Our last watch-list was published in 2014 and we'll be preparing an update before the end of 2016.
In closing, we at the TSB appreciate your focus on rail safety and appreciate being asked here today to speak with you. We hope that our presence will help inform your work and, in particular, we would respectfully suggest that there are two areas that this committee could address. First, is the need for an expedited regulatory process when it comes to implementing safety-related regulations. Second, it could follow up to ensure that Transport Canada is fully addressing the regulatory oversight issues that were raised by the Auditor General and by our own investigations, particularly in the aftermath of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy.
Thank you.
I'll now take questions.
