Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to see you and all of my colleagues once again on this first week back, as Parliament resumes for 2018. I am delighted to be sharing my time with my colleague, the esteemed member for Lethbridge.
I am very pleased to rise today to speak to this bill, which essentially gives the Minister of Transport even more authority when it comes to the safety and quality of vehicles produced and sold primarily in Canada, since it directly relates to vehicle recalls. When a vehicle has a design problem, the auto manufacturer must issue a recall.
We will demonstrate that this is not a new situation, that the appropriate safeguards to ensure the quality of our vehicles already exist, to say nothing of Transport Canada's powers in this area, and lastly, that although the situation has worsened in one way, it has also improved in another. We will explain how a certain balance has been struck. We will also provide some background information, showing how far we have come since the tragic and notorious Pinto memo.
We are talking about cars and safety. At first glance, maybe we could say that this concerns only those who work in the auto industry. We are talking about so many Canadian workers in Mississauga, Windsor, Oshawa, all those strong places where we have produced cars here in Canada for so many years, thanks to the great deal we had with America in the sixties, with President Lyndon B. Johnson and Prime Minister Pearson at that time. Just before him, the right hon. John George Diefenbaker established a footprint to follow in the creation of the Auto Pact deal with America. However, this concerns more than those who work in this industry. It concerns each and every Canadian who owns a car.
One might think that this bill affects only automakers, the people who are directly employed in automobile manufacturing. As we know, Canada's automakers are primarily located in southern Ontario, in places like Windsor, Oshawa, and Mississauga. However, this bill actually affects every Canadian across the country who owns an automobile.
With all of the scandals in the industry in recent years and even in recent months, the major recalls and the tampering with some vehicles, people have the right to know the truth. It is a matter of quality and safety.
In my opening remarks, I talked about mixed signals. On one hand, vehicle recalls seem to be a problem, but on the other hand, the automotive industry seems to have done a lot of self-regulating. Here are the numbers. In 2015, five million vehicles were recalled in Canada. That is huge, particularly given that it is an increase of 74% as compared to 2010.
The complex nature of new vehicles is an important factor. Today's vehicles do not have same parts and are not built the same way as those built in the 1960s. In those days, all a car needed was a body, an engine, tires, and some steering capability and it would work. I am exaggerating, of course. However, there is no denying that today, with all of the computer systems in vehicles, with all of the highly sensitive and sophisticated components for suspension, steering, or what have you, vehicle assembly has become much more complicated. That is why the auto manufacturing plants in the southern Ontario communities I mentioned earlier have so many robots designed to assemble vehicles, and what good robots they are.
Although there has been a significant increase in the number of vehicles recalled in Canada, there have been no lawsuits involving recalls by manufacturers since 1993.
Similarly, between 2010 and 2016, automakers initiated 318 recalls before Transport Canada or other authorities issued warnings. What does that mean? It means that, yes, we are seeing more recalls because vehicles are more complex to manufacture and more difficult to design, so they have a harder time surviving in this environment. Nevertheless, it is clear that the industry is policing itself and doing its own rigorous analysis.
We believe the industry is doing its homework, but we are not against more powers for Transport Canada to make sure the industry is doing its homework properly.
We all remember the unfortunate chapter in history when the Pinto scandal rocked the auto industry forty years ago. The Pinto was a cheap little car that, sadly, performed poorly in accidents, leading to the infamous Pinto memo. The automaker had analyzed the cost of issuing a recall versus the cost of not doing so. Members may recall that the Pinto had a major design flaw. The gas tank was located too close to the back of the vehicle, so that in the unfortunate event of a rear-end collision, there was an explosion that resulted in tragic loss of life. That happened more than once.
Seeing this, the officials then in charge of the company that made the Pinto performed an analysis that would come to be known as the Pinto memo. They concluded that recalling all the defective vehicles for repairs would cost $137 million, whereas doing nothing would cost society $49.5 million, due to the deaths and everything else. When all this came to light in a famous trial in 1977, in the United States, every company in the auto industry was embarrassed, to say the least. This case was a wake-up call for car makers, who realized they needed to do things differently.
Based on the very sad experience of what we called the “Pinto memo” in the seventies, today the industry is very serious, even if we had some difficulty in the last years with the diesel scandal of some auto producers.
As I said earlier, the bill gives the Minister of Transport a little more authority to take action if, God forbid, there is a problem. He can order recalls and more thorough analyses than what are required under existing legislation.
It is important to understand that this in itself is not really new. Back when we formed the government of this country, when the member for Milton was our transport minister, she introduced legislation that would eventually come to steer this current initiative—no pun intended. It seeks to achieve the same thing, that is, to give Transport Canada greater authority and power and make it easier to detect problems, should any arise.
We therefore do not oppose the substance of the bill. We also recognize that some amendments were proposed, some of which were accepted and some rejected. In passing, I would like to commend the meticulous and very detailed work done by the member for Trois-Rivières. I do not mean that facetiously; on the contrary, that is why we are here. Going through this bill with a fine-tooth comb can only be a good thing. We believe that, fundamentally, this bill has a worthy objective, one that we support. Of course, we need to study the bill to know whether it is fair or whether it goes too far.
The last point I would like to make is that, if the bill passes, the power will be in the hands of the Minister of Transport. He or she is the one who would call the shots if there are any difficult times or difficulties to address. If that happens, we hope that the Minister of Transport will have the good judgment to make sure that we have the best protection for drivers and that all Canadians are safe with the new bill. Knowing the experience of the transport minister, I think we are in good hands.