On Wednesday May 2, DaxAir was invited to Parliament Hill and was given the opportunity to be the first, and only 703 Operator to present in front of the TRAN Committee (debating Bill C6). We thought you might be interested in our statement, and watch here (Meeting 48, under "Evidence") for the full meeting including French and English translation:
http://cmte.parl.gc.ca/cmte/CommitteeLi ... &COM=10462
"Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today. We must apologize in advance if it seems we have little documentation to present for we only recently found out that our request had been granted.
What we have to offer you is our own experience and frustration in dealing with the present regulatory system.
My name is Kirsten Brazier, and this is my partner Gerry Whalen. Together we own and operate DaxAir - an Air Taxi Service Service operating under CAR 703 and an Approved Maintenance Organization. We presently operate a Beech 18 on floats. Our work involves tourism, service to the northern communities, and transporting trades and utility people to remote areas.
We are representative of many small operators located across the Country who do similar work, and as we stated in our letter to the committee, the most under represented and most affected by Bill C-6.
Prior to starting our company both my partner and I have had experience in operational management positions, so we were both familiar with navigating through and understanding the regulations. While we do feel the CARS were a hand-me-down from 705 and not specifically tailored to 703 the regulations in general are for the most part fair and logical.
It wasn't until we began the process of certifying both our AMO and Air Operation, and later doing work for other companies, that we began to see major discrepancies between the CARS and how they were being interpreted and applied by Transport Canada.
In certifying our own company we wanted a clear and concise set of manuals that met the CARS - the standard which we must meet in order to have the ability to operate. Because the manuals are legal documents, we did not want the extra liability and confusion from unnecessary policies and procedures We feel that there is no such thing a lesser or greater standard in the CARS - one either meets or does not meet the standard.
Other operators were interested in our approach and asked for our help in ridding themselves of excessive and unnecessary policies and procedures in their own manuals. There seemed to be a general confusion over what the actual standards were.
We discovered that individual inspectors and various regions had different interpretations of the regulations, and accordingly had differing policies to deal with these interpretations.
We discovered that the regulations were not being applied equally and fairly across the system.
When we tried to resolve our concerns as they came up, we discovered a complete lack of due process with Transport Canada. The existing complaint resolution system is ineffective, inaccessible and lacks an independent arbitrator.
We also discovered there is no protection in place for operators who are often bullied by individual inspectors or in some cases departments, to meet individual and regional policies not required by law.
When we started our company, we both agreed we would do our best to abide by the standards and operate safely and responsibly. We knew we were going to have a tough time because of the state of the industry we are in, where cutting corners is common practice.
We are all faced with rising costs and a declining market, so to compete, many Operators continue to overload their airplanes, cut rates and push weather - basically getting more done for less. While this "get more done for less" philosophy may be attractive to the customer, who must pay for the services offered, what the customer doesn't understand is the risks they are taking by supporting this attitude. This only serves to tighten the market further.
As an example, in our second year of operation DaxAir was faced with this type of choice when one of our customers gave us an ultimatum - either carry the loads he wanted, or he would find someone else who would. Since we refused, he found another operator.
We find ourselves in the position that many others have come to - either cut corners to survive and compete, or go out of business.
While we expected a few challenges in establishing our company and operating principles, we also expected that our "doing it right" approach would be supported by Transport Canada. We have found this is not the case.
In trying to understand why these conditions exist, we began reaching out to other operators across the country and discovered that there were similar problems in many areas and others were concerned that nothing was being done. Most of these operators are afraid to come forward for fear of reprisal from Transport Canada. In speaking publicly about these issues, we too are afraid of reprisal based on our experiences with Transport Canada.
Speaking as a 703 operator we feel that a Safety Management System is a valuable business tool. However, given the state of 703 as we described it, we feel there are root problems with 703. Until they are rectified the air taxi sector is not ready for SMS. The culture of safety cannot be legislated.
Our research has shown that Transport Canada is using sanitized statistics to support their safety claims as we pointed out in our letter of April 22. Transport Canada is telling us we have the safest aviation system in the world. They said this same thing 10 years ago in the SATOPS final report. Yet many of the same issues discussed in that report continue to exist today.
If we are really concerned about safety, and truly want to become the safest country in the world, then we need to start sharing information with a view to discussing and learning from our mistakes.
Instead of sensitizing, and restricting safety information such as the Service Difficulty Reports, Transportation Safety Board (TSB) accident and incident reports, and the CADORS (Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System), we need make this information more accessible in its entirety, with industry, so we can learn from it. At present, this information is difficult, if not impossible to obtain from Transport Canada and the TSB who continually cite privacy issues as a reason not to make the information available.
As far as we're concerned, the day an operator receives the right operate, and provide services for the public, they become accountable to the public, to the government, to industry, and to themselves for the way they operate.
In closing, there are many issues we would like to discuss to support our claim, but time being a limiting factor, we have prepared the preceding statements as issues of priority that we as a 703 operator feel must be addressed.
We feel that given a set of clear and concise regulations to follow, and given fair and equitable application of existing regulations by Transport Canada, the industry will by default become safer.
Thank you"
DaxAir makes it to the Hill to testify re Bill C-6....
Moderators: sky's the limit, sepia, Sulako, lilfssister, North Shore, I WAS Birddog
DaxAir makes it to the Hill to testify re Bill C-6....
“Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.” Amelia Earhart
Also at the above meeting was Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) representative: Richard Balnis, Senior Researcher, Air Canada Component. He gave a very powerful presentation which included a 40+ page brief which we were fortunate enough to receive in advance and would be happy to share (we have his permission) with anyone interested. Since his presentation was based on the brief, I won't post it here, but the other extremely fascinating witness was a fellow by the name of Ken Rubin, appearing as a private researcher. His testimony was equally powerful, and very frightening to say the least. I do apologize for the long post but I think it is worth the read. I sure hope what he has to say will really make you all do some very serious thinking. This man has spent over 20 years getting to the bottom of some very serious issues, covered up by lies.
Ken's testimony:
Bill C-6 Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities March 2007
CHANGING BILL C-6's EMPHASIS ON SECRET AIR SAFETY REPORTING
Under Bill C-6, Transport Canada opts for a system very reliant on voluntary but confidential industry safety management reporting (called SMS).
This approach is controversial and cannot simply be described as adding another layer to Transport Canada's arsenal as it is central to whether air safety reporting protection in future will work.
For several years ,Transport Canada has quietly been implementing a SMS delegated inspection arrangement with the airline industry without first coming to Parliament for approval of such a drastic change.
Transport Canada has, however, known that the SMS system cannot operate without being legalized under legislation. They know too that once in place legally, a SMS system is less likely to ever be changed for a system of tougher air safety regulation and reporting.
As a consumer advocate with over two decades of battling Transport Canada on their air safety secrecy and enforcement practices, I have been concerned with this direction that Transport Canada is taking.
That's because under Transport SMS guidelines, the largely self-policing and assessment reporting done by airlines on their safety operations would largely remain secret, including for commercial passenger airlines.
That already happened in the case of the first pilot SMS review Transport Canada did with Air Transat. Air Transat is an air charter company whose air safety performance came to the public's attention following the emergency landing of its Airbus A330 in the Azores on August 24, 2001.
Transport Canada totally denied access to their 2003 twenty-odd page report on how Air Transat was measuring up to initial SMS standards. They claimed, under the Access to Information Act, that the report was reputedly commercially sensitive.
That's very debatable and the report could show a troubled company and also the warts in a developing SMS system of "cooperation" and "prevention". The matter is under complaint with the Information Commissioner. The Committee should obtain a copy of this report.
Under Bill C-6, similar SMS reviews would not even be covered under the Access to Information Act or be subject to the Information Commissioner being able to do much of a review.
The Committee should be made aware that this is not the first time that Transport Canada has tried to implement a confidential reporting system in partnership with airlines. In the nineteen-nineties, Transport called the reports confidential air safety "surveys".
When I discovered and applied in late 1994 for dozens of these secret air safety surveys done between 1990 to 1994,Transport Canada immediately discontinued doing them, partly because the surveys were being asked for under Access to Information legislation.
And indeed, after complaints to the Information Commissioner, I did end up getting some air safety survey reports discussing airline problems. But the majority of them were suddenly unavailable as Transport said they never kept copies and had handed originals over to the airlines who largely claimed to have destroyed them.
Transport Canada also tried to hide a major air safety review report that they did in August, 1991, calling it a confidential voluntary air safety post -accident review. Fourteen Canadian crew members and 249 Nigerian Muslim pilgrims had lost their lives at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 11, 1991. The Nationair crash had occurred after take-off and was because of an improperly serviced DC 8 Nationair plane.
Transport Canada argued that the Nationair report was a confidential air safety survey between them and Nationair and it was for them to iron out the differences and improvements in secret. That's the very philosophy behind SMS.
I did, however, get the Nationair report several years later, in early 1996, after a long and arduous battle that meant going all the way to the Federal Court of Appeal.
The 1991 Nationair report catalogued many serious past maintenance and other deficiencies. It also revealed that those problems were known to regulators well before that air plane crashed in Saudi Arabia. Again, the Committee should get this report to know what Transport Canada is likely to hide from the public under a SMS system.
Under Bill C-6, I would never have gained access to the Nationair report.
In the past, these attempts at an industry-government confidential non-punitive reporting system circumvented but did not do away with or prevent government inspection airline audits from being done or publicly released under the Access to Information Act.
Important to note, however, is that a Transport Canada directive in November, 2006 was issued even before Bill C-6 is fully debated, whereby Transport unilaterally in effect ended doing regulatory air safety audits in lieu of the still not fully legalized SMS system.
The Committee should investigate this.
This would make for instance, the March, 2005 Air Canada Transport audit that I belatedly obtained in severed form that described some problem areas one of the last such major commercial passenger airline reports available.
With regulatory audits being in effect discontinued, there will be no real avenues for public disclosure of how compliant or air worthy an airline is, especially useful information for travellers and the public.
It should be clear that Transport Canada, when it comes to regulatory audits, is very reluctant to even make them public under the Access Act and that this needs changing under Bill C-6.
One strategy has been for airline companies to go to Federal Court and tie the audits up for months or years without Transport. Canada's active intervention. Another strategy has been to add airline company management responses and delay the release of audits for months until the audits were "finalized" and edited and severed.
A deadly example of the later practice was the delay until July, 1989 of Transport releasing to me the 1988 Air Ontario audit that I requested that year.
By the time I received the audit and made public the fmdings about Air Ontario's careless maintenance problems in need of urgent correction, a horrible crash of an Air Ontario Fokker F-28 had occurred in Dryden, Ontario on March 10, 1989. Twenty four people died.
The 1988 audit, done a year before the fatal crash, featured prominently in the follow up inquiry report done by Mr. Justice Mohansky. The Mohansky report questioned Transport Canada's inaction given the little they had done to correct and prevent problems found in the audit. Immediately releasing and shining light on the critical 1988 audit might
have made a difference and made Transport Canada act more aggressively to improve matters.
There are four fatal myths behind the one hundred percent confidential reporting system being promised to the airline industry under the SMS philosophy in Bill C-6.
One is that the airline industry will always report and tell the whole truth via a confidential voluntary reporting. The second assumes that Transport Canada itself will maintain distance from the industry and will be diligent and always do its enforcement job even though the public will have little right to know how well Transport Canada and its Minister are doing their job under Bill C-6.
The third myth assumes that there is no need for a whistle blowing provision because of the reputed positive benefits of an immunity-based industry-government cooperative reporting system. And finally, by Transport Canada changing to this confidential air safety reporting system that follows how well airlines are carrying out SMS performance standards, it wrongly assumes overall more substantive records will be
created that provide the basis of a better overall oversight and surveillance in-house reporting role.
One basic underlying problem that needs correcting is that the Transport Canada Minister under the Aeronautics Act has a dual role -one to protect the public when it comes to air safety, and one to promote the expansion and commerce associated with the airline industry. This needs to change.
Transport Canada's 2004 communications plan on the SMS process, obtained under access legislation, itself acknowledges that a closer government-industry reporting system may be misunderstood:
"This (SMS) approach to regulating air safety will become an issue following a major incident or accident but will otherwise be unnoticed by the gereral public".
That's because, short of a Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) accident focused review or another country's review, should the incident happen outside of Canada, what Transport Canada is doing with the airline under an adopted SMS system to determine deficiencies or to make improvements may never be publicly known if Bill C-6 stands. And Bill C-6 could affect what is being reported in TSB accident reports.
That's why under Bill C-6, I would recommend that:
Ken's testimony:
Bill C-6 Submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities March 2007
CHANGING BILL C-6's EMPHASIS ON SECRET AIR SAFETY REPORTING
Under Bill C-6, Transport Canada opts for a system very reliant on voluntary but confidential industry safety management reporting (called SMS).
This approach is controversial and cannot simply be described as adding another layer to Transport Canada's arsenal as it is central to whether air safety reporting protection in future will work.
For several years ,Transport Canada has quietly been implementing a SMS delegated inspection arrangement with the airline industry without first coming to Parliament for approval of such a drastic change.
Transport Canada has, however, known that the SMS system cannot operate without being legalized under legislation. They know too that once in place legally, a SMS system is less likely to ever be changed for a system of tougher air safety regulation and reporting.
As a consumer advocate with over two decades of battling Transport Canada on their air safety secrecy and enforcement practices, I have been concerned with this direction that Transport Canada is taking.
That's because under Transport SMS guidelines, the largely self-policing and assessment reporting done by airlines on their safety operations would largely remain secret, including for commercial passenger airlines.
That already happened in the case of the first pilot SMS review Transport Canada did with Air Transat. Air Transat is an air charter company whose air safety performance came to the public's attention following the emergency landing of its Airbus A330 in the Azores on August 24, 2001.
Transport Canada totally denied access to their 2003 twenty-odd page report on how Air Transat was measuring up to initial SMS standards. They claimed, under the Access to Information Act, that the report was reputedly commercially sensitive.
That's very debatable and the report could show a troubled company and also the warts in a developing SMS system of "cooperation" and "prevention". The matter is under complaint with the Information Commissioner. The Committee should obtain a copy of this report.
Under Bill C-6, similar SMS reviews would not even be covered under the Access to Information Act or be subject to the Information Commissioner being able to do much of a review.
The Committee should be made aware that this is not the first time that Transport Canada has tried to implement a confidential reporting system in partnership with airlines. In the nineteen-nineties, Transport called the reports confidential air safety "surveys".
When I discovered and applied in late 1994 for dozens of these secret air safety surveys done between 1990 to 1994,Transport Canada immediately discontinued doing them, partly because the surveys were being asked for under Access to Information legislation.
And indeed, after complaints to the Information Commissioner, I did end up getting some air safety survey reports discussing airline problems. But the majority of them were suddenly unavailable as Transport said they never kept copies and had handed originals over to the airlines who largely claimed to have destroyed them.
Transport Canada also tried to hide a major air safety review report that they did in August, 1991, calling it a confidential voluntary air safety post -accident review. Fourteen Canadian crew members and 249 Nigerian Muslim pilgrims had lost their lives at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on July 11, 1991. The Nationair crash had occurred after take-off and was because of an improperly serviced DC 8 Nationair plane.
Transport Canada argued that the Nationair report was a confidential air safety survey between them and Nationair and it was for them to iron out the differences and improvements in secret. That's the very philosophy behind SMS.
I did, however, get the Nationair report several years later, in early 1996, after a long and arduous battle that meant going all the way to the Federal Court of Appeal.
The 1991 Nationair report catalogued many serious past maintenance and other deficiencies. It also revealed that those problems were known to regulators well before that air plane crashed in Saudi Arabia. Again, the Committee should get this report to know what Transport Canada is likely to hide from the public under a SMS system.
Under Bill C-6, I would never have gained access to the Nationair report.
In the past, these attempts at an industry-government confidential non-punitive reporting system circumvented but did not do away with or prevent government inspection airline audits from being done or publicly released under the Access to Information Act.
Important to note, however, is that a Transport Canada directive in November, 2006 was issued even before Bill C-6 is fully debated, whereby Transport unilaterally in effect ended doing regulatory air safety audits in lieu of the still not fully legalized SMS system.
The Committee should investigate this.
This would make for instance, the March, 2005 Air Canada Transport audit that I belatedly obtained in severed form that described some problem areas one of the last such major commercial passenger airline reports available.
With regulatory audits being in effect discontinued, there will be no real avenues for public disclosure of how compliant or air worthy an airline is, especially useful information for travellers and the public.
It should be clear that Transport Canada, when it comes to regulatory audits, is very reluctant to even make them public under the Access Act and that this needs changing under Bill C-6.
One strategy has been for airline companies to go to Federal Court and tie the audits up for months or years without Transport. Canada's active intervention. Another strategy has been to add airline company management responses and delay the release of audits for months until the audits were "finalized" and edited and severed.
A deadly example of the later practice was the delay until July, 1989 of Transport releasing to me the 1988 Air Ontario audit that I requested that year.
By the time I received the audit and made public the fmdings about Air Ontario's careless maintenance problems in need of urgent correction, a horrible crash of an Air Ontario Fokker F-28 had occurred in Dryden, Ontario on March 10, 1989. Twenty four people died.
The 1988 audit, done a year before the fatal crash, featured prominently in the follow up inquiry report done by Mr. Justice Mohansky. The Mohansky report questioned Transport Canada's inaction given the little they had done to correct and prevent problems found in the audit. Immediately releasing and shining light on the critical 1988 audit might
have made a difference and made Transport Canada act more aggressively to improve matters.
There are four fatal myths behind the one hundred percent confidential reporting system being promised to the airline industry under the SMS philosophy in Bill C-6.
One is that the airline industry will always report and tell the whole truth via a confidential voluntary reporting. The second assumes that Transport Canada itself will maintain distance from the industry and will be diligent and always do its enforcement job even though the public will have little right to know how well Transport Canada and its Minister are doing their job under Bill C-6.
The third myth assumes that there is no need for a whistle blowing provision because of the reputed positive benefits of an immunity-based industry-government cooperative reporting system. And finally, by Transport Canada changing to this confidential air safety reporting system that follows how well airlines are carrying out SMS performance standards, it wrongly assumes overall more substantive records will be
created that provide the basis of a better overall oversight and surveillance in-house reporting role.
One basic underlying problem that needs correcting is that the Transport Canada Minister under the Aeronautics Act has a dual role -one to protect the public when it comes to air safety, and one to promote the expansion and commerce associated with the airline industry. This needs to change.
Transport Canada's 2004 communications plan on the SMS process, obtained under access legislation, itself acknowledges that a closer government-industry reporting system may be misunderstood:
"This (SMS) approach to regulating air safety will become an issue following a major incident or accident but will otherwise be unnoticed by the gereral public".
That's because, short of a Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) accident focused review or another country's review, should the incident happen outside of Canada, what Transport Canada is doing with the airline under an adopted SMS system to determine deficiencies or to make improvements may never be publicly known if Bill C-6 stands. And Bill C-6 could affect what is being reported in TSB accident reports.
That's why under Bill C-6, I would recommend that:
- It be clearly stated that the Minister of Transport's primary function is air safety.
It be legally recognized that regular, at least annually, substantive air safety regulatory audits be done and be released in a timely fashion.
Voluntary confidential air safety reports, when done, without being a delegated self-policing system, must have an annual substantive public summary of such work tabled by the Minister under Bill C-6.
Voluntary confidential air safety reporting must be covered under the Access to Information Act and be subject to timely release, injury and public interest tests and be reviewable by the Information Commissioner and Federal Courts.
Whistle blowing protection guarantees be incorporated.
“Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.” Amelia Earhart
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