Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to Bill C-6, An Act to amend the Aeronautics Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts.
We are at report stage in this debate, which is a very crucial phase of the debate where we are considering the amendments that were made at the transport committee to this important bill.
I want to begin by thanking my colleague, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, for his work on this important legislation. He has toiled long and hard to ensure that the House pays due attention to the safety concerns of Canadians when we are travelling by air. He has worked to see improvements made to the proposed legislation.
We still believe it is a very flawed bill but the work of the member for Burnaby—New Westminster has certainly ensured that it is a better bill than it was and the amendments that he has brought forward are very important toward that.
It remains a deeply problematic bill, however, because all of the amendments that were necessary did not get passed.
We debated that process in the House yesterday and we are debating it again today. It is, as I said, a very crucial piece of legislation. I believe all Canadians want to know that they are safe when they are travelling by air. They want to know that the airline industry is safe for the people who work in it. They want to be sure that someone is paying attention to the safety of our air transportation system.
I am not convinced that Bill C-6 would act in the interest of Canadians when it comes to ensuring our safety as we travel by air or as we transport goods by air.
The proposed legislation would enshrine safety management systems to allow the industry to decide the level of risk that it is willing to accept in its operations, rather than abide by a level of safety established by a minister acting in the public interest. It would allow government to transfer increasing responsibility to the industry itself to set and enforce its own safety standards. It is designed in part to help Transport Canada deal with declining resources and high projected levels of inspector retirements.
That is of great concern to me and to members of the New Democratic Party. The basic premise of the bill to allow the transfer of responsibility from government to the corporate sector for something as important as ensuring safety just is not an acceptable way to go.
As someone from British Columbia, I have watched the increasing number of railway accidents in recent years that have caused deaths and environmental problems in British Columbia and across the country due to safety concerns. We have also heard concerns from some of the workers whose colleagues have been killed in these accidents and from workers who have made that a key component of their bargaining in recent collective agreement negotiations with the major rail companies in Canada. They have tried to highlight their concerns for ongoing safety because we know that the railway industry has a similar system to what is being proposed in Bill C-6 for the airline industry. We have seen the failures of that by the large number of railway accidents in recent years.
As someone from British Columbia, I am also concerned about the major derailments on the former BC Rail line which have caused many deaths. There have been many fairly dramatic accidents. One accident in particular was the Cheakamus Canyon derailment which caused the death of that river and will require probably decades of remediation work to bring the river back to even some semblance of what it once was. The derailment caused the dumping of hazardous materials into the river which killed a huge number of fish and other creatures that live in that river system.
It is a very important concern to me, to the people in my riding and to the people of British Columbia when we see a safety record in the railway industry that causes those kinds of concerns and has led to those kinds of accidents and has not improved the safety record of railways. It has done nothing to improve it, to make it better, to prevent accidents, to prevent the deaths of workers and to prevent environmental problems that result from those accidents.
I think we want to be absolutely certain that any legislation that goes forward from this place does not contribute to a similar circumstance in yet another transportation industry. Our concern is that Bill C-6, which deals with the aeronautics industry, would lead to similar circumstances in the management of safety concerns and the attention to safety details.
It is always a concern to us when we turn safety monitoring, safety enforcement and enforcement measures over to the corporate sector to follow because we know that in the corporate sector the bottom line is the financial ledger. It often does not pay the attention needed to safety because of its concerns about profits. I suppose that is a reasonable circumstance if one were in the corporate sector, but I do not think it is a reasonable assumption or a reasonable premise for Canadians who use the airline industry.
I remember where this was first driven home for me years ago. It was at the Miners Museum in Cape Breton. I do not know if the museum is still there because it has been some decades since I was there. However, off the main lobby of that terrific museum on Cape Breton Island was what looked like a side chapel and there was a glass case that had a number of objects in it. One of the two key components in that display was the company ledger showing the profits that the company was making. The other component was a list of the workers who had died in that particular mine because the museum was built on the site of a former coal mine on Cape Breton Island. There was no explanation as to why the company ledger was sitting there beside the list of workers who had died but it made a very powerful statement and a very deliberate statement about how those two things were not combined naturally to pay attention to the safety of the people who worked there and to ensure their safety and well-being as they worked there.
For me, that was a very dramatic example of the kinds of concerns that arise when we allow the corporate sector a free rein over issues like worker safety and the safety of the travelling public, which is why I am very skeptical about the direction of Bill C-6 and what it hopes to accomplish as a piece of legislation in this House.
Safety should never be subject to the rise and fall of a company's profit margin. I think that is particularly true in the airline industry where we know that often airline companies have had a difficult go of it in Canada, where we have seen airlines come and go in recent years because of the difficulties of making a reasonable profit, of making a go of it as a business in that industry. That kind of circumstance, I think, is ripe for the kinds of concerns to arise over cutting corners when it comes to dealing with questions of safety.
I know there are many concerns that we have in this corner about Bill C-6 but we do not think the amendments at report stage go nearly far enough to addressing all of them.
Our three major concerns are around the safety management systems. As I have already noted, the airline industry would be permitted to increasingly define the safety level of its operations. I think all of us would see some flaw in allowing that to happen. We are concerned that there would be no spokesperson for the travelling public to ensure that there is another standard applied to those operations.
We also know that heightened secrecy would be allowed because of this legislation. It would restrict access to information on the safety performances of airlines. Certainly, in a situation where we are turning that over to airlines, that is of great concern. Any more secrecy is not appropriate.
We also know that the whistleblower protection included in this legislation for employees would not be strong enough to allow an employee who sees a serious concern about safety to make that public and seek a resolution to that where it has not been given appropriate attention by the company, and that is not acceptable either.
We also see that there is a lack of accountability overall for airlines in this because it would give them, I think, far too many chances to voluntarily correct problems, that it would set deadlines in a timely fashion rather than on an immediate or urgent or—
