News release

TSB 2020-21 Annual Report: Advancing transportation safety through unprecedented times

Gatineau, Quebec, 10 December 2021 — The Transportation Safety Board of Canada’s (TSB) Annual Report for fiscal year 2020-21 was tabled in Parliament. The report discusses key annual statistics on occurrences in the aviation, marine, pipeline and rail modes of transportation under federal jurisdiction, and how the TSB has worked to advance safety for travelers and industry workers in all four sectors across Canada.

“Although this last fiscal year brought some unique challenges for our organization and the transportation industry, the TSB continued its dedicated work both at home and internationally”, comments TSB Chair Kathy Fox. “Through these uncertain times, we kept evolving and working behind the scenes to ensure our organization remains strong, flexible, and a world leader in occurrence investigations.”

The year in results

• The TSB began 41 new investigations and completed 66 across all four transportation sectors (aviation, marine, pipeline, and rail).
• Limited scope Class 4 investigations accounted for 48% of the total investigations completed during the reporting year.
• TSB investigators deployed 29 times in response to occurrences in all sectors. Due to travel and other public health restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, the TSB had to minimize in-person deployments and, when feasible, rely on other methods to gather information.
• By the end of fiscal year 2020–21, the Board had given 84.5% of the responses to the 612 recommendations it made since 1990 the highest rating of Fully Satisfactory. This means that stakeholders, including Transport Canada, have acted to substantially reduce the safety deficiencies the Board identified.
• In support of TSB investigations, engineers, technicians and human factors specialists began 145 projects and completed 152 technical reports.
• The number of SECURITAS reports the TSB received dropped by 31%, likely the result of the decrease in transportation activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Involvement at the international level

The January 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 marked a tragic start to this decade. Following the occurrence, the TSB appointed an Expert to the investigation and pursued its involvement in accordance with Annex 13 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation throughout 2020-21. As the final safety investigation report released by Iran in March 2021 raised more questions than it answered, the TSB remains committed to advocating for a review of the provisions of Annex 13 to improve the independence, credibility and transparency of future safety investigations in these very unique situations.

Watchlist 2020

As it has every two years for the last decade, the TSB issued the latest edition of its Watchlist last October, identifying eight key safety issues that require government and industry attention. Watchlist 2020 included several issues carried-over from previous years, but one issue was also removed, another was split into two, and a new one was added in the rail sector.

Behind the scenes

Earlier this year, the TSB launched its new 2021–22 to 2025–26 strategic plan to guide its work as it begins its fourth decade of influencing change to advance transportation safety; and with it, a new data management strategy to better leverage data to support our evidence-based findings. To better support our workforce, the TSB launched a new mental health strategy and a renewed employment equity plan.