Cat, you may be right, however I don't know enough about these people to form an opinion about them in this particular situation.
But I do know that the inspector in question was against this situation with the forced approaches. Apparently, what I'm told is that it was discussed amongst examiners (both TC and non-TC examiners), and there was an overwhelming majority wanting to restrict changing of firlds during a flight test.
I had a meeting with said person, which shed a lot of light on all of the new standards for me. There are a few things I agree with, a few I disagree with, and a few things I just don't know about. Of course I absolutely disagree witht he forced approach thing, as you can all see. The biggest changes however occured with the Commercial Standards.
The standards were made tougher for two reasons. One is that Canada was once considered to have the best training standards in the world. Since that time, nothing has changed while the world, namely the FAA and especially the JAA have surpassed Canada. So now they're trying to play catch-up. I don't necessarily agree with this because who is to say that the JAA way of doing things is good? I admitedly don't know a lot about their system, but from what I've heard here, and from people I've talked to from Europe, it seems overly excessive in terms of requirements and standards.
The second reason was that Canadian Operators have been apparently complaining of the quality of pilots they've been getting. Specifically they don't think for themselves. An example given that a pilot was brought up with a check flight with the CP of a VFR operation, the DG was covered up by the CP, and the pilot was told to turn from his present heading of North, to a Heading of West. Well the pilot, who was flying VFR, proceded to turn his watch over tot he timer, and started a rate one timed turn. The pilot could have simpoly looked left 90 degrees and turned towards some landmark. Now to me this seems like it was just a fresg experienced pilot who was programmed for a flight test.
Another example that was given was the diversion exercise for the commercial. New commercial pilots were used to setting up some race track patern or orbiting some town to plan out a diversion, when the idea of the commercial diversion is to apparently depart within 30 seconds and go somewhere. For example a customer tells the pilot 'hey my cottage is over there, can we go see it?' and if a pilot proceeded to orbit some town for 5 minutes and plan a diversion, he wold surely be fired the next day.
Anyways these are just some examples that were given to me, I did not come up with these. But I think it boils down to the fact that commercial students are trained to pass a flight test, and nothing else. So they add things to the flight test, so that instructors can continue training their students only to pass a flight test. To me this seems quite silly. It's not a solution to the problem. It's just changing the problem. Something should be done to change how instructors are teaching Commercial Students.
What exactly should these changes be? I have no idea, but I just know this isn't it.
I've typed too long, so my monologue ends here for now
