Approach to Canadian Air Safety Oversight Needs Improvement

There are several weaknesses in how Transport Canada has managed the transition to a new approach for overseeing air transportation safety, says the Auditor General of Canada, Sheila Fraser, in a recently released report. Under the new approach--a requirement of the International Civil Aviation Organization...

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There are several weaknesses in how Transport Canada has managed the transition to a new approach for overseeing air transportation safety, says the Auditor General of Canada, Sheila Fraser, in a recently released report.

Under the new approach--a requirement of the International Civil Aviation Organization for all member countries by 2009--aviation companies must have their own safety management systems (SMS) for controlling risks. This means that like other civil aviation authorities, Transport Canada will shift its primary focus from traditional oversight such as conducting inspections and audits to assessing the safety systems that companies have in place.

"Although Transport Canada deserves credit for being the first civil aviation authority in the world to introduce regulations for this new approach, we found weaknesses in several areas," said Fraser.

The audit found that in the first stages of the transition, affecting 74 airlines and aircraft maintenance companies, Transport Canada carried out pilot projects and made adjustments as needed. However, in planning the transition, Transport Canada did not formally assess the risks involved in the change or forecast the overall costs of managing it. Nor has it measured the impact of shifting resources from traditional oversight activities to the new approach, Fraser's report concluded.

The audit also found that Transport Canada has not yet identified how many inspectors it needs both during and after the transition, and what competencies they should have.

"The rest of this transition process will be more complex to manage, with over 2,000 smaller companies affected. We hope our recommendations will help Transport Canada to complete this change successfully," said Fraser.

"Transport Canada has thrown caution to the wind when it comes to safety. For the past 3 years, Transport Canada has reduced safety oversight in favor of giving responsibility to the industry itself without any knowledge of the risks involved for the traveling public or ways to mitigate them," Captain Greg Holbrook, chairman of the Canadian Federal Pilots Association, is quoted as saying. "Without understanding the risks, Transport Canada cancelled key oversight programs like the National Audit Program, and canceled enforcement actions on serious infractions of safety regulations in order to implement SMS. These findings make a mockery of Transport Canada assertion that Safety Management Systems are an additional layer of safety and their insistence that this is not a shift to self-regulation of aviation safety," Holbrook added.

Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon said the department was addressing Fraser's recommendations. In a statement, he said Canada's air transport system was the "safest in the world. What we are doing is moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more targeted approach, by implementing an extra layer of safety."