Keep seatbelt on while ‘cut red tape’ sign is lit
The most dramatic revelation from Canada’s auditor general is the story of the F-35 cock-up. No question.
But the most worrying — and telling — portion of Tuesday’s report by Michael Ferguson is his description of the Conservative government’s chillingly casual approach to air safety.
Casual because this government has no use for regulation and is going out of its way to cut what it calls red tape.
Chilling because when governments don’t bother to regulate air safety, planes crash.
Ferguson is quick to point out that we haven’t hit the disaster point yet. In fact, the number of air accidents overall has fallen in the past two years, thanks largely to a reduction in incidents involving small carriers. But he also notes that: In contravention of its own rules, the government failed to inspect two-thirds of so-called high-risk aviation companies last year;
Most of the inspections it did make were flawed;
Successive governments have failed to address safety concerns, some of which are more than 10 years old, ranging from pilot fatigue to bad runways to electrical fires;
The government still refuses to say how many inspectors it needs to do the job properly, even as it cuts back the transport department budget that supports them.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t invent deregulation. Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin led the way — particularly in the pharmaceutical and agribusiness sectors, where they trimmed regulations to fit the needs of the companies being regulated.
But the Harper Conservatives are taking deregulation to a new level.
In part, that’s because the Conservative hard right thinks regulations in general and Ottawa civil servants in particular serve no useful purpose.
In part, it’s because key members of the Harper team — Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, Treasury Board President Tony Clement and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty — cut their political teeth in Mike Harris’s Ontario Conservative government.
Two years ago, Flaherty even set up a mirror of Harris’ old red tape review commission.
As the people of Walkerton might remember, and as a later judicial inquiry affirmed, it was the Harris government’s casual approach to regulation that set the stage for a disaster in which seven Ontarians lost their lives from drinking tap water contaminated with cow dung. Up to now, most attention has focused on Harper’s promise to scale back environmental regulations — particularly those he thinks might inconvenience resource industries. But Ottawa has also quietly cut back meat-packing inspections — a decision that made news only in 2008 when 22 people died from contracting listeriosis after eating packaged cold cuts. The listeriosis deaths followed a pattern that readers of Ferguson’s report might find eerily familiar. First, Ottawa replaced direct inspections with self-regulation. Meat-packing plants were told to set up self-monitoring systems. Federal inspectors would, in most cases, limit themselves to ensuring that plants were following their own rules. Second, the government cut back the number of inspectors so they couldn’t even do that. As Ferguson notes, this is what has happened in Transport Canada. Since 2008, aviation companies have been, in effect, self-regulating. Federal inspectors are supposed to monitor them. But in most cases, they don’t. Incidentally, Transport Canada is slated to have $62 million more cut from its annual budget. According to government documents, these cuts are part of plans for “reducing red tape.” As was Walkerton. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.