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June 13, 2008 The web news resource PublicValues.ca focuses this week on the issue of airline safety, an area of public policy set to be harmonized across the continent through the Security and Prosperity Partnership. North American leaders have signed an agreement for the promotion of aviation safety, including the mutual acceptance of each country’s “airworthiness approvals and environmental testing and approval of civil aeronautical products,” as well as “approvals and monitoring of maintenance facilities and alteration or modification facilities, maintenance personnel, flight crew members, aviation training establishments, and flight operations.” Transport Canada is well on its way to harmonizing how it regulates the airline industry with U.S. practices that are facing increased opposition. Amendments to the Aeronautics Act are in third reading in the House of Commons this week as MPs debate an amendment from NDP MP Brian Masse. “If proposed changes to Canada's regulations affecting the airlines (Bill C-7) pass Third Reading in Parliament, airline safety will become more an airline responsibility and less a public one,” writes Ish Theilheimer. “With airlines under enormous pressure due to soaring oil prices, consumer and labour advocates say safety is likely to be compromised.” The Toronto Star put the new law this way: “At the heart of the change is a move by Transport Canada to let airlines police their own operations. Under this change, airline employees will be encouraged to flag safety concerns within their own organizations.” The neoliberal conviction that governments do too much and that industry should police itself permeates official Ottawa and Washington these days, and forms the basis of ongoing North American regulatory cooperation and convergence plans under the SPP. Lost in this narrative is the fact that we have government regulations precisely because industry has proven it cannot be trusted to voluntarily abide by strict public health or environmental standards. While having chemical or drug companies monitor the safety of their own products is bad enough, the problems become even more obvious when you start thinking about planes falling out of the sky. Theilheimer writes in his Public Values article that: “This month [the U.S. airline] Southwest was ordered to pay the largest fine in aviation safety history — $10 million — for gross and numerous airplane safety violations that were ignored or unreported. Planes had been allowed to fly in unsafe condition on the say-so of airline officials — not inspectors — under new federal ‘partnership’ arrangements with the airline industry. As a result of the fine, the legal costs and the bad publicity, Southwest may not survive as a company, leaving hundreds without jobs and many of the areas its serves without air travel. The violations were only exposed because a group of company inspectors finally reported the abuses. At least two of the whistle-blowers received death threats.” Pressure to scrap this cosy federal-private sector partnership is mounting in the United States. But through Bill C-7, Canada is trying to implement this failed U.S. experiment, all in the name of regulatory harmonization. The proposed amendments to the Aeronautics Act have also been harshly criticized by the Canadian Association of Journalists, which nominated Transport Canada for a 2008 “Code of Silence” award for “proposed draconian secrecy provisions in amendments to the Aeronautics Act which, if implemented, will see a veil of secrecy fall over all information reported by airlines about performance, safety violations, aviation safety problems and their resolution.”
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