Response to Walrus Article Criticizes the TSB
Safer Trip
In “Fly At Your Own Risk” (November), Carol Shaben alerts us to Transport Canada’s dilatory response to questions surrounding the inadequacy of its safety oversight program: an apparently irrelevant $690,000 consultants’ study. Indeed, this is precisely the type of bureaucratic game I discussed some eighteen years ago in connection with the disintegration of the Transportation Safety Board’s sad predecessor, the Canadian Aviation Safety Board, in my book Improbable Cause.
But while Shaben looks to Justice Virgil Moshansky’s brilliant report on the 1989 Air Ontario crash at Dryden for a solution, his analysis was by no means the first. Roll back the clock another decade to the Commission of Inquiry into Aviation Safety, initiated in the wake of a deadly air crash at Cranbrook, BC. Based on exhaustive hearings and frightening case studies, Justice Charles Dubin urged the creation of a long-sought-after independent tribunal to investigate aviation accidents and conduct public inquiries in the interest of aviation safety. Had the resulting casb functioned as intended, Moshansky’s inquiry would have been unnecessary. (Judge C. H. Rolf had, presciently, made this very observation about his own inquiry into the 1984 Wapiti Aviation crash.)
After the CASB’s collapse, following the scandalous investigation of Canada’s worst-ever aviation disaster — the crash of the Arrow Air DC-8 in Gander, Newfoundland, in 1985 — the legislation drafted to replace it didn’t incorporate recommendations from a study (yes, another) by future Supreme Court justice John Sopinka that reiterated Dubin’s call for a truly independent tribunal. Instead, the new multi-modal tsb became “an agency of inefficiency, secrecy and chronic timidity,” according to yet another long-forgotten study — a year-long review of the TSB’s first three years of operation conducted by former Alberta cabinet minister Louis Hyndman.
Do we need yet another inquiry at this point to rediscover Justice Dubin’s remedy? Or should we focus on the record of thwarted reforms and the twice-failed implementation? Remember, every time history repeats itself the price goes up.
Les Filotas
Ottawa, ON