The same day, Feb. 25, that a Turkish Airliner crashed short of Amsterdam’s airport and weeks after a Q400 crashed nearing Buffalo’s airport, Canwest News Service reported the latest in the Transport Canada’s Safety Management System (SMS) saga. 

The SMS is the federal government’s scheme to download responsibility for civil aviation safety to the providers, Air Canada, etc.  In a first step, Transport Canada has already eliminated national and regional auditing programs. 

The report said that inspectors would be assessing each airline’s SMS over the coming year.  However, the report didn’t say what is taking the place of the eliminated national and regional auditing programs during the assessment period.

The report also said that some airlines have required the government inspectors to sign confidentiality agreements which would forbid the government inspectors to disclose any potentially embarrassing information about an airline’s safety problems that turn up in an assessment. 

Transport Canada, it turns out, found out about these agreements only recently and believes some of their inspectors have signed them.

Canwest reported that legislation enabling SMS died on the order paper in October but the report didn’t explain why no SMS legislation hasn’t seemed to have stopped Transport Canada.

One critic, David Gollob, senior vice-president of policy at the Canadian Newspaper Association, believes that commercial airlines are using confidentiality agreements to avoid public scrutiny. 

He was quoted as saying, "There is a very strong feeling in the airline industry that the public needs to be protected from information that might cause panic or disquiet or prejudice the competitive advantage of one operator or another."  He also stated that Transport Canada is on side with this idea that such information should remain secret.

The National Airlines Council of Canada, an industry lobby group, believes confidentiality is important to promote transparency between the carriers and Transport Canada but that the public mustn’t know any details of a company’s SMS.  The Council thinks that only if the information is kept secret will a carrier be encouraged to be open and promote safety. 

The implication is that if Transport Canada releases information on an airline’s self-declared safety shortcomings, (self-declared in its SMS report) this will encourage the airline to hide things and compromise safety.

Bob Kotyk