Transport committee  I appreciate you blathering on about that because I think that's very much my concern and my problem—and perhaps it came through in my comments— that we are the safest mode of highway transportation. To the point about whether you are unsafe on a coach without a seat belt, no, yo

Transport committee  It's a manufacturing standard, not a use. The U.S. rule isn't that you have to have seat belts, it's that you have to manufacture a coach with seat belts. It's a manufacturing standard issue. A coach without belts would still be legal to operate in the U.S. if it was manufacture

Transport committee  Right. To address the fact sheet, what I was trying to say there is that seat belts are not the only safety issue. As I said in my opening remarks, the issue of coach safety goes beyond just having seat belts. Seat belts are important and no one would suggest otherwise, and we

Transport committee  Anything as complicated as safety is a whole tapestry of issues. It's enforcement on bad operators. We heard a lot from the previous panel about driver training and the importance of having good drivers. It's about having structural integrity of the coaches. It's about having sea

Transport committee  If I can address it, the transition was, more or less, what Transport Canada is doing now—no retrofit but a manufacturing standard that all new coaches sold must be equipped with, and it's illegal to remove them. What we're doing now is exactly what the Americans did.

Transport committee  You hit the nail very much on the head. The market forces have played a huge factor in this. When the industry started lobbying for seat belts back in the early 2000s, it was because we were getting a lot of pressure from our customers to have coaches with belts and they wanted

Transport committee  To be honest, I'll take your advice. I don't have a good answer to that.

Transport committee  Again, it depends on whether it's being operated by a transit system, a coach or school bus company.

Transport committee  That's complicated. The issue of retrofitting is easier with more recent equipment. I think Mr. Parsons addressed that issue. Some coaches that were built, say, in the last 10 years already have the structural integrity to take belted seats. They already have the rails in them. H

Transport committee  That's a really complicated issue. Like a lot of things you're looking at, there isn't one industry here that you're talking about. There are all kinds of different facets of people who operate motorcoaches, school buses, scheduled services versus charters. On scheduled service,

Transport committee  It's an overdue move. My frustration as a lobbyist—and I suppose everyone's frustration—was that I understood that the government's attitude was that it couldn't bring in a different law than what the Americans have, that that was fine, that it would wait until the Americans did

Transport committee  Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this important dialogue around motorcoach safety. At the outset, I think it's important to remind ourselves that on the whole, motorcoaches are the safest mode of surface transportation, and second only to airlines in incidents per

Transport committee  It's hard to say that there's one perfect model. If you look around, TTC is one kind of transit system, and it's a very different beast from Transit Windsor or one in a small community that only has a half a dozen buses operating. It's hard to say that one model fits all, because

Transport committee  Yes, I think that's fair.

Transport committee  Right. As I said, that's something that should probably be included in it, how we deal with that. In fairness, it widens the scope considerably when you talk about the whole health of the motor coach industry. There are a lot of other issues around economic regulation, and our