Thank you, Madam Chair. It is a pleasure to see you at the helm of our committee again.
Welcome to everyone with whom I had the pleasure of working last year and whose faces are familiar to me. Welcome also to those of you who are joining us, and I hope you will be here permanently. If not, I heartily commend you. That is all for my greetings, since I probably have more questions to ask than the time available will allow.
I would like to draw particular attention to a sentence in your opening remarks. You said that Bill C-49 seeks transparency, fairness and efficiency. I must admit that I stumbled over the word “efficiency”. Let me cite a few examples from various modes of transportation that do not illustrate efficiency.
The first example is probably voice and video recorders. The report about these recorders, conducted by a working group of the Transportation Safety Board, or TSB, found that the use of these recorders would have been helpful in arriving at definitive conclusions in their investigations in less than 1% of cases. Less than 1% of cases. If we are talking about recorders, that is unfortunately because there has been an accident. In the interest of efficiency, I would think that train conductor fatigue should be addressed before the recorders. In our air safety study last year, we found that pilot fatigue was an important factor to be considered.
Why is Bill C-49 so specific about requirements for recorders while saying so little about conductor fatigue?