Mr. Chair, what Canadians heard is that the minister is not responsible for this, and she has done absolutely nothing to lower costs to make our Canadian airports more competitive.
I would like to go back to rail safety, and I want to rely on the most objective document produced in the last two years in Canada, which is the report of the Auditor General, on rail safety. I want to review for Canadians a number of the Auditor General's key findings and conclusions.
First, the Auditor General and his team audited a three-year period at Transport Canada, which is this minister's department. She is the fifth minister in eight years, transiting through, I guess in terms of this cabinet, either up, down, or out.
However, the Auditor General's report on whether federal railways have actually implemented safety management systems states that “Transport Canada has yet to establish an audit approach that provides a minimum level of assurance that federal railways have done so”.
That is number one, which flies in the face of the minister's assertion that there are SMSs as a world-class system in place.
Two, on safety, the Auditor General says that Transport Canada does not have clear timelines. The report states: “We found that the work plans are vague in terms of timelines for monitoring progress on important safety issues”.
Three, critical information is not available at Transport Canada. It cannot deliver up risk assessments. It cannot give us information on the sections of track used in transporting dangerous goods; and I think of Lac-Mégantic. It cannot give us information on the condition of railway bridges. It cannot give us financial information of privately owned federal railways not publicly available.
The Auditor General then tells us that Transport Canada, in the three fiscal years that were audited, actually only performed 14 audits. That is 14 audits when they themselves said that only constituted 25% of the audits that they said had to be done in order to keep rail safe in this country. In fact, in that three-year period, VIA Rail, which carries four million passengers a year, was not audited once.
Not once.
I asked the minister earlier about qualified inspectors. In 2009, Transport Canada said that it needed 20 system auditors to audit each railway once every three years. How many were in place? There were only 10, half of what is required.
Next, the Auditor General tells us that Transport Canada does not know whether its current staff of inspectors have the required skills and competencies to do their jobs: “Inspectors and managers were not trained on a timely basis”.
The Auditor General says that they cannot even warrant that inspectors are objective and independent because they are coming from the private sector and mainly from federal railways.
This is a scathing indictment of the last eight years, and five ministers, on rail safety. However, when we listen to the minister speak, all is good with rail safety, apparently.
Can the minister explain to Canadians how it is possible that these findings are so serious that at committee, the Auditor General stated clearly that he is going to be adding another interim report to examine how much progress has been made under the current government.