Mr. Speaker, I am glad to rise on Bill C-7, the unsafe skies act, because I think it is important that Canadians are aware of what is actually in this bill that is being proposed by the Conservatives and that was proposed by the previous Liberal government as well.
Essentially, this bill would do for the airline industry what we saw done for the railway industry and for business aircraft. I will come back to that in a moment. What it does is hand over, through self-serve safety, SMS, the safety management systems of airlines, to the airlines themselves, to the corporate CEOs.
Why would this be proposed by the government? People who came before the transport committee, the chief bureaucrats at Transport Canada, were very clear that over the past few years we have seen a substantial increase in the number of flights in Canada. There is no doubt about that. There has been a steady and substantial increase from one year to the next in the number of flights in Canada.
What have Conservative and Liberal governments done? While they were handing out tens of billions of dollars in corporate tax cuts, they decided that they could cut back on the number of safety inspectors.
According to testimony at the transport committee just a couple of weeks ago, it turns out now that through attrition we have lost a couple of hundred flight inspectors. We are not even at the full strength we were at 10 years ago. We are now down to less than 750 flight inspectors for the entire country.
Let us picture this. We have an escalating number of flights over Canadian skies and a smaller number of people to protect the public interest. What is the brilliant plan? Let us hand over safety management systems to the airlines themselves.
As the member for Halifax said, with some airlines I do not think any of us would have any concerns at all. We have some very well run airlines in Canada. However, not all of them are well run.
And here is the problem with the unsafe skies act. Essentially what it would do is hand over safety management. Whether the airline is an Air Canada or a Jetsgo, it would simply take care of safety itself.
That is simply not acceptable to the vast majority of Canadians, who want to make sure when they put their loved ones on an aircraft that the aircraft is certified as safe and is overseen by registered flight inspectors through the Government of Canada with the tax dollars that Canadians pay to ensure the safety of the travelling public.
We have seen this story before. We saw the same kind of thing happen with railway safety. The government said that we did really did not need to have all those railway inspectors. It said that we should just hand over inspection to the railway companies themselves. What happened? There was an escalating derailment rate, with deaths across the country. Unfortunately, British Columbia in particular is a victim of that wrong-headed and irresponsible policy of self-serve safety in the railway industry.
We are dealing with that legacy today as we see more and more derailments. There are higher rates now than there were before this handover.
We saw the first implementation of SMS with business aircraft. With business aircraft, we had a perfect record. For over more than a decade under the previous system, with flight inspectors in place, business aircraft in Canada were perfectly safe. When I say “perfectly safe”, it essentially means that with business aircraft there were no accidents. There were no fatalities.
We turned over business aircraft to SMS and we have seen the first fatalities. Thus, through this wrong-headed--and let us call it what it is--budget-cutting measure, we have turned a perfect system into a situation where people now are dying, where people are victims.
It did not work for railways. It has not worked for business aircraft. Why would any member of Parliament in his or her right mind vote for a bill that is not going to help or enhance the safety of the travelling public but would essentially do the opposite?
I think it is fair to say that in this corner of the House the NDP has been saying since this bill first came forward that there were problems with it. We tried to fix it in committee. We got a number of amendments through.
Then the government and the Liberals worked together and basically steamrolled the bill through, badly flawed, as the member for Halifax said, with huge gaps that will have a result and an impact on the travelling public.
We do not have to look far. If it did not work for railways, has not worked for business aircraft, then we would think, rather than going for the three strikes and playing some sort of strange dice game with the lives of the Canadian travelling public, that the Conservatives would say that there is a problem here.
The government should say that it is going to have to withdraw this bill and actually look at it and see what the impacts are of cutting back on flight inspectors, handing over safety management to airlines, good or bad, and perhaps most particularly, ensuring both increased secrecy around safety problems that occur in the airline industry and also a get out of jail free card for corporate CEOs. They could violate the law, but they have a confidential reporting system that basically gets them around what essentially should be a safety system that protects Canadians.
These are the fundamental problems with the bill. It has not worked in the two sectors it has been implemented in. This is a big problem.
The Auditor General's report did not analyze the actual impact on safety. All she did was analyze how the paperwork was being handled by Transport Canada. The report that came out a few weeks ago was very harsh in condemning Transport Canada for not getting the paperwork right.
I am not concerned about the paperwork. When the Auditor General says that there are fundamental problems and flaws with the bill, I think the government should sit up and take notice. Members of Parliament should sit up and take notice.
But when the Auditor General says the paperwork has not even been done right, then we have to wonder about the impact with the implementation of this bill. If the government cannot get the paperwork right, we can be darn sure that it is not going to get the safety systems right.
The NDP initially was the spokesperson for the Canadian travelling public. I know now that there are members of the Bloc and the Liberal Party who are now questioning this whole issue and are concerned about it as more and more voices speak up against it, Judge Moshansky being one of them. There are the flight inspectors across this country who are concerned about the impact on safety. I could mention many more.
Fortunately, the fact that the NDP has been speaking up has led to other voices being brought forward. That is why we are opposing this bill.