Canada needs more aviation inspectors, air traffic controllers: union

Article content

OTTAWA – The head of Canada’s air traffic controller union said he’s frustrated that the government has not shared with him the results of a UN agency audit that badly downgraded the country’s air travel regulatory, oversight and inspection regime.

Canadian Air Traffic Controllers Association (CATCA) president Nick von Schoenberg said neither the federal government nor Nav Canada, which operates the civil aviation system, has shared the report by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in which Canada’s score had reportedly fallen by over 30 points, out of a total score of 100. That would put Canada under the international average for oversight and inspections.

Article content

He said he’s wondering what the government might be hiding.

“I haven’t actually seen the report, and that kind of bugs me,” he said. “Maybe if we read the audit, we would feel much more comfortable with that score. Maybe we’d feel a lot less comfortable.”

Von Schoenberg says his own members are overworked and understaffed. He also said the government needs to hire more aviation inspectors in light of the damning report (inspectors are represented by a different union). Neither ICAO nor the government have made the document public, but draft copies were obtained by some media outlets in December. The confidential audit did not look at the safety of Canada’s aviation sector, but rather the country’s regulatory, oversight and inspection regime.

“We need more inspectors. We need better training for the inspectors (and) part of the problem is recruitment,” von Schoenberg said in an interview.

Article content

Canada’s score of 95 in 2005 dropped to a reported 64 in last year’s audit. Reports noted the draft concluded that three areas of safety oversight in particular were behind the big drop-off: aircraft operations, airports and air navigation.

National Post has not seen the full report, but The Canadian Press obtained a draft copy in December.

CATCA’s president insisted that Canada’s aviation industry is among the safest in the world but noted that it is increasingly self-regulated.

“I think what the audit shows is we can’t demonstrate that we’re safe, we don’t have the processes in place to ensure that we’re safe. And that’s a very different thing from saying we’re unsafe,” he said.

The UN body recommended that the federal government establish a system to lock in full regulatory compliance by airlines and airports, shore up certification related to dangerous goods and ensure proper training and fatigue management for air traffic controllers, according to The Canadian Press report.

The CATCA president said the recommendation on fatigue management for air traffic controllers is an problem he’s been pressing for a while now.

Article content

The chaos in Canada’s airports that began in late 2022 and well into 2023 as Canadians began travelling after years of pandemic lockdowns revealed a number of issues with the country’s aviation industry, including a shortage of air traffic controllers.

Von Schoenberg says short-staffing for air traffic controllers has worsened significantly in recent years, with airports struggling to staff towers appropriately using overtime while avoiding exhausting controllers. He said there was currently a shortfall of roughly 300 workers across the country.

“We’ve functioned at a minimal staffing level for a long, long time,” he said. “When we got into the pandemic, things got real, and they had to lay off trainees… and now given the way training works, you can’t just ramp it up and recover in a hurry.”

“It’s going to take a long time to dig ourselves out of that hole. So, things have gotten worse,” he added.

In response to reports on the draft ICAO audit in December, the Canadian government stressed that the UN report was not a measure of the country’s safety performance and that it did not note any issues requiring immediate action.

“ICAO has not identified any significant safety concerns with Canada’s civil aviation system, and we know our country’s air sector is among the safest in the world,” Laura Scaffidi, a spokesperson for Transport Minister Pablo Rodriguez, said at the time.

National Post

With additional reporting by The Canadian Press

Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.

Share this article in your social network