Good day. I'm George Iny, executive director of the Automobile Protection Association. With me is John Raymond. He's a member of the board of the association and also a former auto dealer. He works very closely with us on a number of issues, including vehicle safety.
The Automobile Protection Association, APA, is a not-for-profit organization. It was founded in 1969. It provides a public information service using telephone hotlines and a website.
We are one of the major sources of complaints to Transport Canada on presumed vehicle safety. We also work closely with university research teams across Canada to encourage proper oversight of the vehicles on our roads.
We are a small team. We even do a lot of work with people from the industry because we much prefer realistic solutions, but always while representing the interests of consumers.
I'm here today to go over perhaps some of the measures that are in the proposed Bill S-2. I'll try to give you a little colour or background information to go with it. Currently, there is a database where you can look up vehicle recalls. It's a very good database. It's an old one. But it's not in real time, so you will find out if there ever was a recall for your vehicle, but it will not tell you if your actual vehicle was fixed or not and we would like to have that ability.
In the time between when Bill S-2 came out and today most carmakers, because there's an American requirement, came on board and are pretty much doing that. This would allow the stragglers to be picked up. It would also allow the government to put in perhaps some minimum information that you would be able to get, because not all of the websites are easy to use and not all of them give you the full information on the recall.
This is an important pre-condition if you want to get used cars corrected before they're resold. It's a big problem, and one of the objections the retailers have, and also the provincial ministries, is that there isn't a standard way to look up that information that's easy. I might add that a provincial safety inspection, which people assume involves a check for recalls, actually doesn't currently. The two systems don't talk to one another. So if this is fixed, in other words, if we have at least standardized, good quality real-time information, then maybe that might be included as part of the inspection process.
Administrative monetary penalties would be a more expedited tool than using the courts. The government doesn't go to court very often and when it does, it loses, so this would be something that we're hoping would be used more. It's a little difficult, because you're giving basically a gym membership to somebody who you don't know is actually going to use it and get stronger, but that's our hope. They would be creating a tool that the government could then use, and in that case it would allow it to have a little more leverage with carmakers that aren't being very compliant.
An important provision that we feel the administrative monetary penalties should have is a set-aside for research in the area of vehicle safety or injury reduction. Most of you are aware that Volkswagen was not so recently found to have cheated on diesel engine emissions, but actually the people who discovered it were working under an award, a research grant, from a previous investigation where a different carmaker or truck maker had been found guilty of cheating. In other words, some of that money if it's collected should be set aside to further the cause of vehicle safety.
On the power to order correction of defects, they've had it in the United States since the early 1970s or late sixties. It's a flaw in our original act that the way the act was written what seemed politically or maybe practically reasonable at the time was a letter by mail. Since then, essentially, events have overtaken our act, so more than 99% of recalls or about 600 a year are happening and, I would say easily 98% roughly are happening with what's called voluntarily. So the repair is being done by the carmaker either because they think they should do it or because they're required to do it in the United States.
We're looking at three, four, five, or six recalls a year where the government really needs more muscle. It's not a huge game-changer when you look at what's happening already.