Transport Committee on Nov. 29th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I'm going to have to shift over to Mr. Hardie now.

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

Thank you again, Madam Chair.

There are a couple of things here.

Mr. Johnson, I want a little about innovation and experimentation. What kind of environment exists right now?

I come from an era when kids used to soup up their cars, and there were drag strips where they could go and show off what they had accomplished. I would imagine that in this area, you have everything from the lab where they're working on bigger, better, faster, higher, right down to the kids working in the family garage at home.

What is the industry doing to embrace and engage the whole range of activities that could be going on here?

[Doug Johnson]

In fact, Madam Chair, though you, we at the Consumer Technology Association are trying to uphold that broad spectrum of interest in drones, ranging from the kid who wants to play with the toy drone to more sophisticated commercial operations involving drones that are often on the same platform as can be bought by the consumer.

It's important to have a policy framework that allows somebody to play with a drone, get interested, and then decide that they could make a business out of it or that they could start a small business and provide a service, maybe providing a service to their local real estate firm by taking pictures.

We want to have a pathway for those people—maybe kids, in some cases, or adults—to learn about this technology, play with it, get interested in it, and do something with it.

At the association level, we're certainly aware, broadly, of the activities of our members, which range from providing new features and new models on their drones, introduced every few months, to companies experimenting with ways of controlling multiple drones at the same time—not just singles, but swarm approaches to drone technology.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this industry, but it does have kind of a personal dimension to it that we want to keep in mind too. Today's recreational user might be tomorrow's small business owner.

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

You both have mentioned coming up with performance-based standards. I would be very interested in getting some more background information on what you consider those standards to be. That is something that you could submit offline. Just briefly now, could you give us maybe the top two or three performance-based standards? What kind of performance would you want to see included in the regulation?

We'll start with you, Mr. Wilcox.

[Stephen Wilcox]

The technology is great, and we should make the regulations performance-based so we don't limit what technology can do.

A great example would be requiring a performance-based standard in all of them so that as the unit begins to lose signal, before it loses signal, or immediately after it loses signal, it immediately lands. Those kinds of technologies would be in the performance. It would be part of the design standard that the technology must accomplish this. The same kind of thing would apply if it was nearing the end of its battery life in flight. It would need to land.

Where we have databases, we could consider databases of registered air drones. There are roughly 1,000 registered air drones. You could build into the software that it must contain the locations, and that they can't fly in those locations.

That's a bit of an impediment for commercial operations. They might in fact be permitted. Again, that's the sort of thing that I think you can do quite easily with technology, with a performance standard that says the unit must perform in such a way.

[Doug Johnson]

The example I would like to give regarding performance-based standards, Madam Chair, would be from the approach we took on the advisory committee concerning drone flights over people, which, except for the very lowest category, was a weight-based approach.

We broke out categories based on energy per unit area. The way in which you would meet a threshold determined by the regulator—that is, the numerical value—would be open to different approaches, not restrictive in terms of technology and ways to meet that threshold through various mitigations, but flexible in that regard. In other words, it would not be prescriptive, in that you must use this technology if you want to do this kind of operation, but rather that you need to meet this energy impact threshold and you can do as you wish and invent as needed to meet that threshold.

That is an example of a performance-based standards approach in this realm.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

You have half a minute for a short question.

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

There was a firearms manufacturer somewhere who wanted to make a ceramic firearm that wouldn't be picked up by airport security. The issue is that just because you can, you shouldn't necessarily do some of the things that technology allows you to do.

Again, we look to industry to use some common sense here, Mr. Johnson. Do you see evidence that this framework is in place?

[Doug Johnson]

Our industry is focused on safety, and it shares that interest with the aviation community. We are participating as full partners in these regulatory dialogues with governments and we are focusing our industry's energies on innovating safety measures in this regard.

I would stress that we're coming from a perspective that not only includes appreciation for safety but obviously involves innovating our way to solutions that can uphold safety.

That's the response I would give, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I thank our witnesses for sharing that information today. There were a number of requests for information, starting with Mr. Berthold on occurrences and including the letter from Mr. Garneau. I think you've all heard the requests.

Now I have to make a bigger request: can we get the information by the end of next week? The committee was hoping to be able to table an interim report by December 15, so we would need to have your information, if you could get it to the clerk for distribution to the committee, by the end of next week. It would be very much appreciated.

Thank you very much.

We will suspend momentarily while we switch our witnesses. I thank you again.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We have representatives from the Department of Transport: Laureen Kinney, assistant deputy minister, safety and security; Aaron McCrorie, director general, civil aviation; and Mark Wuennenberg, general flight standards inspector.

From the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I believe we have Byron Boucher, assistant commissioner, contract and aboriginal policing. We may also have as an RCMP witness Staff Sergeant Dave Domoney.

If we're moving along a bit quickly, it's just that time is of even more essence, as we expect a vote to be called, and we very much want to hear from all of you today.

I will turn the floor over to the Department of Transport, to whoever would like to go first.

[Laureen Kinney, Assistant Deputy Minister, Safety and Security, Department of Transport]

Thank you, Madam Chair. I am speaking for Transport Canada.

I have a prepared set of remarks, but if the committee would prefer, I could table those to be reviewed afterward, in the interest of giving you more time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Yes, that's good, because we all have them.

[Laureen Kinney]

Then I would just say that we welcome the opportunity to speak today and look forward to your questions. We will attempt to give you as much information as we can in as brief a period as possible.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Okay.

Do we want to hear from the RCMP now as well, with their opening remarks? Yes?

Go ahead, Mr. Boucher.

[Assistant Commissioner Byron Boucher, Assistant Commissioner, Contract and Aboriginal Policing, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Good morning, Madam Chair.

In the same way, I don't know whether you want me to read through these notes or not. We can do the same thing Transport has done, as you have them before you in both official languages. In the interest of time we can answer questions, but I'm prepared to go through the remarks as well, if you wish.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Could you just speak to the report without speaking to it line by line? Just give us a bit of an overview from your perspective, and then we can bombard you all with questions.

[A/Commr Byron Boucher]

I am Assistant Commissioner Byron Boucher. I oversee contract and aboriginal policing.

It's a confusing name for those of you who may not be totally familiar with it if you live in what we call non-contract provinces, like Ontario and Quebec. I oversee operations in provinces that have contracted the RCMP either as their provincial police or as their municipal police. That's every province and territory except Ontario and Quebec, where we just have federal operations.

I'll give you some context to my opening remarks in reference to our use of unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly known as drones.

The RCMP context of using these is not at all what you would think of if you were considering what the military does with them. We pretty much use off-the-shelf models, the kind that anybody could buy. Some of them are more expensive, but only because of the equipment that is on them, such as upgraded cameras or infrared detectors.

They are basically used four different ways by the RCMP.

The first and foremost use is for accident reconstruction. When we have a serious motor vehicle accident, where at some point we're going to have to appear before the court or an inquiry, we would bring in a drone to take aerial photographs and photograph the scene in preparation for court. As an example, when we would have had to do it prior to drones, it would have cost us probably $2,000 an hour to bring in a helicopter, whereas there's a minimal cost to bringing in a drone and using it a lot of times for much less money.

The second way we would normally use them is for aerial photographs of crime scenes. If we have a major crime scene where there's been loss of life and it's happened across the span of a property, then we would do the same sort of thing in preparation for court. These are areas that would be fenced off prior to using the drone, so there's no public access. There's not a privacy concern for us in either one of those two considerations.

The third use is for search and rescue. Keep in mind that for us these drones, as we currently have them configured, will last only for about 30 minutes of airtime, which is quite limited, prior to changing a battery. There have been situations where we've had people lost in densely wooded areas, and we have been able to locate them with the use of a drone.

The final use is for what I'd call exigent circumstances, where we might have a hostage situation ongoing where there is potential loss of life, and we've had to call in the ERT. To protect ourselves and others, and to get a good view of the property and surrounding area to see exactly what the threat risk is, we could send up a drone to have that kind of view without putting any human in the line of fire.

Otherwise, with privacy considerations, we deal considerably with the Privacy Commissioner's office. I've updated them throughout our work on this file, and I have allowed them to see and feed into our policy to make sure that everything is in line. With a limited 30-minute flight time, when we think about surveillance by the police, drones are not really a tool that we would go to in our current configuration. Obviously the U.S. military or Canadian military, I'm not sure, would use them in much different ways.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

We'll go to questioning.

Go ahead, Mrs. Block, for six minutes.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

Thank you very much. You don't know how delighted I am that I have my voice back, perhaps to the dismay of my colleagues across the table.

Thank you very much for being here this morning. I appreciate your testimony. I have taken a quick look at what was submitted by Transport Canada, so I know that some of the questions I have are probably answered in this document, but I will proceed to ask them anyway.

We've heard from a number of witnesses from the industry, and today from the Airports Council, in regard to unmanned aerial vehicles. They've made some comments around the need to facilitate alignment with other jurisdictions by looking at best practices and looking for the right balance in a policy framework.

I'm wondering if you think the requirements for commercial drone users contained in the new U.S. small unmanned aircraft rules, which is part 107, would be sufficient to mitigate the risks of drone use in Canada.

[Laureen Kinney]

I'll just introduce a response, and then turn to Aaron McCrorie, who is the director general responsible and who has studied it in much more detail.

First of all, let me say that we do strongly believe in aligning our jurisdictions and our regulatory processes with multiple other jurisdictions. It's important for safety that we don't have gaps in our systems that allow safety risks to creep through, and also for industry to be able to move across the border to do services, such as construction and manufacturing, etc. At the same time, we do have a different legal system. We do have particular unique features, so it's important we make sure that we address those and that we have a good strong regulatory framework.

I'll turn to Aaron.

[Aaron McCrorie, Director Genral, Civil Aviation, Department of Transport]

Thank you for the question.

I'd start off by saying that from an aviation safety point of view, we already have a very highly integrated approach with the FAA with the alignment for our regulatory requirements. When we drill down to the level of unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, through the Canada-United States Regulatory Cooperation Council, we are working toward harmonization or alignment. They're not necessarily the exact same measures, but rather alignment with them, and Mark is one of our guys who spends a lot of time with the FAA making sure we line up.

For the specific requirements that are in place today, the rules that the FAA is putting in place by and large mirror what we already have put in place through a series of exemptions in November of 2014 that are allowing commercial operations or non-recreational operations under certain circumstances, if they follow certain conditions.

As we move forward, opening up the ability for people to operate in built-up areas over people is where the Americans are going, and that's where we're going, but neither of us is quite there yet.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

I note in your remarks that you speak to our provincial, territorial, and municipal counterparts, who are also challenged with how to ensure the safe and respectful use of this technology. I'm wondering if you could describe for us what the delineation of authority is, or what's different between the federal regulations and what the provinces are responsible for.

[Aaron McCrorie]

I'm not a constitutional expert, but as I understand it, under the Constitution Act aviation under the Aeronautics Act is primary, so all aviation activities fall under federal jurisdiction. The way the Aeronautics Act is written, any place an aircraft takes off from and lands at is an aerodrome, so we have exclusive jurisdiction over unmanned air vehicles. That means we need to work on partnerships with those other levels of government, and we've started outreach with municipalities, with the provinces, and especially with law enforcement, because we work very closely with our colleagues in the RCMP. They can play a critical role in helping enforce the safety regulations.

[Kelly Block, Conservative, Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK]

In his Canada transportation strategy 2030, the Minister of Transport stated that his department is also working to ensure that drones or unmanned air vehicles are subject to simple, clear, and enforceable regulations. I'm wondering if you could tell us what work Transport Canada has undertaken to date to achieve this.