Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. It gives me an opportunity to clarify this important point.
Obviously, at the beginning, as I said earlier, we did not support the bill, which would establish a safety management system. To us, it was somewhat abstract, and it seemed to be beyond oversight, in terms of government responsibility. However, we satisfied ourselves that all inspections of the system done by federal inspectors would be continued.
I have read the amendment that is part of the report tabled, and it is quite important. It says "the Minister shall maintain a program for the oversight and surveillance of aviation safety in order to achieve the highest level of safety established by the Minister".
This means that obligations were added that were not there in the bill at the outset. It simply referred to establishing the safety management system in a general way, even by designated organizations for companies that were able to set it up themselves. That was of considerable concern to us in the beginning, as it was to you.
However, by maintaining the minister's obligation to continue all inspections that are in fact done, we made the bill acceptable, particularly given that safety management systems have already been set up in a majority of the major airlines. It is therefore a system that has been tried and tested.
We heard testimony from pilots. They told us that it was a good system. They were reassured by the fact that their companies had their own safety management systems, that they were not simply relying on a federal inspector who makes regular visits, although I do not know exactly what the frequency of the inspector's visits are. Still, if we are completely assured that at least the same level of inspections will be maintained by the government, the system put in place once and for all should provide us with better safety in future. We certainly must not simply rely on an inspection that may be done every six months or once a year.
Therefore, with a system that is kept in place permanently, we should be even safer. We must not, however, eliminate the companies' obligation to submit to inspection by the federal inspector who is really there to check that everything is as it should be.