When the TSB issues a recommendation, under our act the minister is required to respond as to how the department will address that recommendation. That response has to be given to us within 90 days. We then assess the response and then reassess the response, typically annually, until the matter is resolved.
What we were finding a few years ago is that on a number of recommendations that we had made to Transport, the department had laid out a plan of action with a timetable, and while the plan of action seemed reasonable in terms of addressing the safety deficiency, the timetable was being continually shifted to the right, continually delayed. A few years ago, we said that instead of giving our rating of satisfactory intent, meaning that Transport Canada's plan was reasonable, we would no longer accept protracted delays. We would start assessing some of these recommendations as unsatisfactory. Even though the plan was reasonable, the timetable was not. After several years of that, when we did our latest watch-list, we realized that even on some of those recommendations, there still wasn't action being taken on a timely basis. There were still delays, and that's why we escalated this particular issue to our watch-list.
Since we issued the watch-list in October 2016, we have just gone through the reassessment cycle that we do annually on outstanding recommendations. We have not seen much movement on many of those recommendations, however, recognizing that Transport's response to us would have come within a month or two after issuing the latest watch-list.