Transport Committee on May 2nd, 2017

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Luc Berthold]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hardie.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speer and Mr. McKeogh, for your testimony, which we greatly appreciated.

We are now going to suspend the meeting for a few minutes to let our witnesses leave the room, and to allow our next group of witnesses to come in.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Luc Berthold]

We are going to resume the meeting immediately please, since people are here and are quite anxious to testify before the committee.

During this second hour, it is our pleasure to welcome Mr. Greg McConnell, national chair of the Canadian Federal Pilots Association, Mr. Jean-Marie Richard, aviation safety consultant, as well as Mr. Dan Adamus, Canada Board president of the Air Line Pilots Association International.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

Mr. McConnell, you now have the floor for five minutes. We are going to be very strict with allotted time.

[Captain Greg McConnell, National Chair, Canadian Federal Pilots Association]

Thank you and good afternoon.

CFPA members work as Transport Canada's most highly skilled aviation inspectors. I am here to add their front-line perspective to this very important study.

Our message is sobering. We are witnessing the dismantling of aviation safety oversight in Canada and the progressive weakening of Transport Canada's inspectorate. This state of affairs has been years in the making. Piece by piece, the checks and balances that have delivered one of the safest aviation systems in the world are falling victim to cost-cutting and misguided management. Meanwhile, the perishable skills and competencies of inspectors are deliberately being allowed to wither.

All the while, Transport Canada officials reassure you that all is well. But consider this: a dangerous culture of non-compliance and secrecy has set in over the years. Transport Canada has come to regard safety regulations and international safety requirements as little more than inconveniences that can be ignored to satisfy budget limitations or industry pressure, without regard to public safety. I say “dangerous” because this culture affects aviation in Canada at large.

In a recent example, last August, without consultation and in secret, Transport Canada completely withdrew or reduced safety oversight from significant portions of aviation, including all airports in the country, business aircraft like those in which Jim Prentice and Jean Lapierre died, urban heliports, and aircraft that do dangerous work like fire bombing.

While reassuring you that inspection is robust, Transport Canada watered down its inspection process in order to boost its 2016 performance metrics. These and other decisions have been taken without notice to Parliament, MPs, or the public, through a bureaucratic tool called an internal process bulletin, a practice the department is using with increasing regularity.

Transport Canada is quietly planning to roll back oversight even further by completely washing its hands of monitoring the proficiency of pilots, delegating professional pilot exams to industry, and allowing airlines to set their own operational safety standards without checking. With the cancellation of the inspection and audit manual, Transport Canada gave up its ability to ensure compliance with the safety regulations. The singular reliance on SMS puts Canada offside with ICAO, which requires member states to establish and maintain safety through direct operational oversight. In fact, Canada fails to meet more than half of ICAO's mandatory minimum safety requirements. That's right: Transport Canada is offside with eight out of 13 of ICAO's mandatory minimums. These are requirements, not suggestions. Our assessment of Canada's performance in this regard can be found at tab four of our handout.

In keeping with its default towards secrecy, Transport Canada hasn't notified ICAO of these deficiencies, as member states are required to do.

You may be wondering how it is possible for my remarks to be so different from the story you heard earlier from Transport Canada. I was struck by the misleading nature of the testimony you heard from officials. It deserves a reality check, which we have produced for your information. This can be found at tab five.

We should be able to provide the minister with a signed written statement that the inspected airline is fully compliant with all safety regulations. Right now, an inspector is not able to do that. That is why I urge your committee to recommend that the government reinstate compliance audits to determine whether or not an airline is in compliance with safety requirements.

On behalf of the public, the minister needs to know if the airlines are meeting safety requirements, not whether or not they have a good SMS. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the public is expecting the minister to trust the airlines to act in their own self-interest but also to verify that safety standards and requirements are being met. Without this change, an aviation disaster on the scale of Lac-Mégantic is very likely.

Transport Canada must be put on a tighter leash. There should be no more sweeping decisions to dismantle oversight made in secret. Transport Canada should be required to justify in a public forum, such as this committee, why less oversight means more safety.

It has been more than a decade since ICAO last audited Transport Canada's safety oversight system; this happened in 2005. Your committee should recommend that Transport Canada invite ICAO to complete a full assessment of Canada's compliance with minimum international safety requirements.

Finally, we concur with Justice Virgil Moshansky's recommendation for a commission of inquiry into aviation safety oversight. We agree that it's long overdue.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Luc Berthold]

Thank you very much, Mr. McConnell.

Mr. Richard, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Jean-Marie Richard, Aviation Safety Consultant, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for your invitation to appear today.

My presentation will be from a regional perspective, more down-to-earth and less strategic than the other witness presentations.

I worked for 26 years in management at the Civil Aviation Directorate of Transport Canada. Since 2010, I have been providing training on aviation safety in different institutions.

We are in a period of continuous aviation safety improvement, and we must make the necessary efforts to ensure that this situation continues. Nine years after the implementation of the Transport Canada Civil Aviation Oversight Program, its relevance and effectiveness are still being questioned.

My presentation covers three areas. First, the oversight of Transport Canada, in effect since 2008. The simultaneous implementation of the new surveillance procedures, including increased surveillance, program validation inspections or PVIs, SMS assessments, and the civil aviation internal organization, have had a significant impact on the industry oversight. At first, PVIs revealed that operations managers lacked operational control, which could have been avoided if they had the necessary tools, like quality assurance, to exercise that control. Thus, the SMS airlines' implementation undertaken in 2005, should be completed by the addition of the quality assurance element. For enterprises that do not have an SMS, the implementation could be done over a longer period, starting with quality assurance.

Secondly, I'd like to speak to the training of civil aviation personnel. In the Quebec region, training gaps were identified in 2013. Corrective actions require a regional investment and appropriate headquarters support.

My third topic is training within the industry. Since December 2014, the public no longer has access to all Transport Canada documentation, and this has made the preparation of training courses far more difficult. We are missing a lot of information. I provide further details in the brief I prepared for you.

I will do my best to answer your questions to the best of my abilities.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Luc Berthold]

Thank you very much, Mr. Richard.

I now yield the floor to Mr. Adamus for five minutes.

[Captain Dan Adamus, Canada Board President, Air Line Pilots Association, International]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members.

ALPA is the largest non-governmental safety and security agency in the world. This allows us a unique ability to provide professional pilot expertise.

Our brief, which we submitted earlier, highlights several important areas where aviation safety could be enhanced. For the sake of time today, I would like to highlight one issue: fatigue management.

For many years, Canada has lagged far behind the rest of the world in adopting science-based fatigue rules. While work began in the 1990s, no progress was made until a 2010 working group, composed of representatives from industry and government, developed recommendations for meeting ICAO standards.

In 2014, Transport Canada issued a notice of proposed amendment, NPA, dealing with fatigue management. This NPA very closely mirrored the working group report that, in our view, was very much a reasonable and responsible compromise in order to move the process forward. Although not all of ALPA's concerns were addressed in the report, it was as step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the 2014 NPA has since been diluted, as witnessed in the notice of intent, NOI, that was recently issued by Transport Canada. While one can only speculate why this has happened, we are aware of many operators that have been lobbying for change to the NPA based on economic or operational concerns, not safety concerns.

In the current proposal, we have five key areas of concern.

One, these rules would not apply to all commercial pilots.

Two, the implementation period for smaller operators is way too long.

Three, if the current proposal proceeds, Canada will have one of the highest monthly flight hours and the highest monthly duty hours in the world.

Four, Transport Canada stated in the 2014 NPA that aerial work, air taxi, and commuter operations accounted for 94% of all commercial air accidents. However, the current proposal not only exempts aerial work entirely, but also gives air taxi and commuter operators four years to comply.

Five, fatigue risk management systems, FRMS, as outlined in the recent NOI, will allow operators to bypass the prescriptive rules without formal approval or oversight from the regulator. What perplexes us even more is that the draft proposal also permits aerial operators—and as I mentioned, the sector that has the highest accident record and that will be exempt from the rules—to obtain further relaxation of the current inadequate rules Canada has in place.

While the rest of the world has progressed in line with international standards, Canada's current rules continue to fall behind. In order to help advance Canadian aviation safety, ALPA recommends that Transport Canada proceed with the prescriptive rules as it proposed in the 2014 NPA, while taking into account ALPA's comments. Additionally, it is important that a one-year implementation period, applicable to all sectors of commercial aviation, be enacted.

Furthermore, we need to hit the pause button on FRMS. We believe in FRMS, but rushing this product to market without proper consultations with industry is setting up for failure. Over the course of your study, you have heard claims that the new regulations would be financially devastating to some operators. Our analysis does not support that.

Let's look at the U.S. as an example. It transitioned to new science-based rules just a few years ago. Initially, the large operators anticipated that they would require 3% more pilots and small operators 7% to 10% more pilots. However, a post-implementation study conducted by the RAND Corporation found that the impact of the new rules on pilot supply and demand was about half of what was anticipated.

To further demonstrate ALPA's concerns, we have provided you with a chart so you can see how Canada compares with several other countries. Green indicates where Canada would be ahead, yellow is for where it would be on par, white is for where data is missing or there's no comparable rule, and red is where Canada would remain behind. As you can see, there's a lot of red.

On behalf of not only our 55,000 members, but all Canadian pilots, we thank the committee for carrying out this very important study. I look forward to your questions on this and on other aviation safety issues.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Luc Berthold]

Thank you very much, and thank you very much to our three witnesses for having so carefully respected the time they were given.

I must say that you have all presented briefs that contain a lot of information. My colleagues will surely have the opportunity to read them carefully, which will provide background for our debates.

Mr. Rayes, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all of you, especially for adapting to today's irregular schedule, due to the votes and motions that were introduced.

My first question is for you, Mr. McConnell.

The comments you made are almost frightening. A few weeks ago, some officials from Transport Canada appeared before the committee and stated that oversight was very active.

Do you agree with that statement?

I might even go a little further and ask you whether, in your opinion, the number of inspectors in the field has increased or decreased.

[Capt Greg McConnell]

There are a number of facets to your question. With respect to the number of inspectors, it's remained relatively stable. However, with attrition, new inspectors come in, and they're not being trained.

With respect to the activity of which Transport Canada has spoken, the number of inspections that they're conducting, rest assured that those numbers are not being met. I'm talking about the planned numbers that Transport Canada uses when they plan on a yearly basis to inspect the airlines. As a matter of fact, arguably 50% to 65% of their targets are not being met.

Due to the use of a secretive internal process bulletin, what they have done is reduce the complexity of inspection that they are now going to do. To understand that, you have three types of inspections: a full-scale assessment, which is a large assessment; a process validation inspection, which is a lesser degree of inspection; and the process inspection. They are moving toward process inspections only to keep their numbers up, so if that's the activity to which you are referring, then I guess they are increasing their activity.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

My next question is somewhat related to that. In your presentation, you put a great deal of emphasis on Transport Canada's reduced ability to fulfill its duties in terms of assessment and rule enforcement.

Could we say that something of a cultural secrecy exists within Transport Canada—a sort of a code of silence—in terms of telling it like it is?

Can you give us further specific examples of deficiencies in the work those people have to do?

[Capt Greg McConnell]

There are again a couple of facets to your question. With respect to the training that the inspectors are supposed to get, nine out of 10 mandatory courses are no longer being offered. So how is it the inspector or the minister can be protected when we're not being provided with these courses in order to go out and try to complete the oversight? When you say oversight, Transport Canada is lacking because we no longer have primary oversight.

In 2013, through an internal process bulletin, we cancelled the inspection and audit manual. It's no longer available. Primary oversight does not exist. SMS exists. Canada is unique in the world with respect to the implementation of SMS, and they have forgotten about primary oversight. They now have SMS as a tool that was supposed to have been implemented as an umbrella; however, it's become the only tool. Some of the portions of the air sector are not governed by SMS, 703 and 704, for instance, the air taxi commuter industry. They have the wrong tool to govern certain sectors of the industry.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

That is worrisome.

Earlier, my colleague Mr. Aubin moved a motion to get the Minister of Transport to appear before us. We really would have liked to put a number of questions to him in the wake of the various comments you have shared. Unfortunately, that motion did not pass.

Can you tell me when the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, last carried out an inspection on the current Transport Canada rules and inspection systems?

How would you say Canada compares to other developed countries in that area?

[Capt Greg McConnell]

I can tell you unequivocally that the last ICAO audit was completed in 2005.

With respect to how Canada ranks with other civil aviation authorities around the world, I believe we're relying right now on our reputation. With the dismantling of the safety oversight culture within Transport Canada, it's the safety of the flying public they're putting at risk. You would have to ask ICAO, I think, to rank where Transport Canada sits.

I do know with respect to my colleagues' issues with respect to fatigue management that we are light years behind.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Richard, I would like to put a short question to you in light of your comment. Your brief says that Transport Canada decided to stop making certain documents available on its website. Have you asked Transport Canada any questions about that? What reasons have they given you?

[Jean-Marie Richard]

I was a subcontractor for the Quebec region when that happened. I prepared training for post-assessment corrective action plans. All the documents containing elements of that training simply disappeared. All the Transport Canada internal documentation was removed from the department's website. The guidelines and personal instructions were removed.

Afterwards, some of those instructions were put into advisory circulars. The difference between an advisory circular and personal instructions is that advisory circulars don't have to be followed, whereas a Transport Canada inspector must follow their personal instructions.

The documents are identical. However, the purpose of those two documents is not the same.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Rayes, but your time is unfortunately up.

Mr. Iacono, you have six minutes.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

To answer Mr. Rayes, I can tell you that Minister Garneau will be with us, here, on May 9.

You can ask all the questions you desire. I'm sure it will be the minister's pleasure to respond.

Mr. Richard, I would like to hear what you think about the concerns raised by Mr. McConnell. You seem to think that regulatory oversight and SMS have improved our aviation performance.

[Jean-Marie Richard]

SMS oversight, when performed according to the instructions provided in advisory circular No. SUR-001, goes beyond compliance. In fact, when inspectors prepare their assessment, they must review the company's files and write their assessment list, in addition to ensuring that the company meets the expectations of advisory circular No. SUR-001. So they ensure compliance and make sure that the systems work, which is not something that was being done before. That is if the inspectors follow....

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Mr. Richard, do you think a national investigation on aviation safety is really necessary, given Canada's current performance?

[Jean-Marie Richard]

I personally don't think so.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Very well, thank you.

I will share the rest of my time with my colleague, Vance Badawey.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Badawey, go ahead.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Iacono.

First off, it was interesting to see the contrast between Mr. Richard and Mr. McConnell with respect to your comments. It was very interesting.

I have to ask the question, and it was asked earlier, about flight simulators and the ability to essentially do procedures or exercises with a simulator versus in the air.

Mr. Richard, do you feel that the flight simulators actually offer the opportunity for pilots to really have more of an ability to practise and to train safely on a simulator versus some situations that may occur in the air?

[Jean-Marie Richard]

Flight simulators are not my field of expertise, so I cannot answer that one.