By Nicolas Maltais 
Less than a month ago, I wrote about the challenges facing Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) in Canada, the staffing gaps, the quiet normalization of operating right at the edge, and the uncomfortable truth that “minimum responders” too often becomes “minimum to staff the vehicles.” That is not a theoretical problem. It is the kind of problem that shows up as restrictions, disruptions, and cancellations on ordinary days, and as a very different kind of risk on the worst day.
Now we have another piece of the puzzle, and it should make everyone who cares about airport safety sit up straight.
In June 2023, Canada was audited by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) under its Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme (USOAP). Transport Canada’s own briefing materials say the audit produced an Effective Implementation score of 65.1%, a steep drop from 95% in 2005. The same material is careful to point out what airlines quickly emphasized in their media responses: this is an audit of the state’s oversight system, not a direct judgement that every Canadian flight is suddenly unsafe.
Fine. But let’s not turn that clarification into an excuse to stop thinking.
Because “oversight” is not a box you check for fun. Oversight is the system that turns written rules into lived reality. Oversight is what decides whether standards are enforced consistently, whether risks are identified early, whether training and fatigue programs are scrutinized properly, whether deficiencies become corrective actions instead of press releases. Oversight is where you notice weak points before the public notices consequences.
If Canada’s oversight score is in the mid-60s, the question is not whether airlines can point to internal safety management systems and third-party audits. The question is why the national safety oversight apparatus is performing at a level that Transport Canada itself concedes needs corrective action plans, and why that decline happened on our watch.
And the question after that is even more blunt: what does “declining oversight capability” look like on the ground at airports, especially in the parts of the system that get stretched first when resources are thin?
That is where ARFF lives.
The most severe events are low-frequency but high-consequence. You can go years without needing ARFF at full capacity, right up until the day you need it all at once, and nothing else will substitute.
We have already seen what “thin” looks like
Canada does not need to imagine this as a hypothetical. We’ve lived it.
On January 18, 2022, St. John’s International Airport announced it did not have adequate fire hall staffing to continue normal commercial operations, and the Minister of Transport publicly acknowledged passenger flights would face interruptions and cancellations until staffing was addressed. That was not a minor inconvenience. It was a bright flare fired into the night sky: if you cannot staff your fire hall, you cannot maintain your operational level, and the system starts to break in public.
Then, in October 2025, Wabush Airport became the latest reminder of how fast this can get real. Multiple reports described major disruption because firefighting and crash rescue resources were not available, with aircraft carrying 20 or more passengers unable to operate. You can argue about which regulation and designation triggered which requirement. Regular people do not care. What they experienced was flights grounded, medical travel thrown into chaos, and a community once again learning what it means when safety services are treated like optional infrastructure
If you read those incidents as isolated, you miss the point. They are symptoms. They are what happens when critical safety functions are treated as elastic, and staffing becomes a variable you can stretch.
The “cargo hold” incident belongs in this conversation too
And sometimes the cracks show up in ways that are so surreal people laugh at first, right up until they realize how close it came to being a tragedy.
In mid-December 2025, aviation outlets reported that passengers on an Air Canada Rouge flight from Toronto to Moncton heard banging and screams coming from the cargo hold while the aircraft was taxiing. The plane returned to the gate, and a baggage handler was found trapped inside the cargo compartment. Reports describe a pilot telling passengers it was the first time in his career he had encountered something like it, and that the employee was safely removed.
Air Canada has not, at least in the reporting I have seen, released a detailed public account of how it happened.
Now, let’s be precise: that is not an ARFF deployment story in the narrow sense. This is ground handling and ramp safety, a procedural breakdown that should never get past the basic checks that keep workers from being sealed inside an aircraft. But it absolutely is an airport safety story, and it fits this article for one reason: it is what “thin margins” look like.
When the system is under pressure, when turnarounds are rushed, when staffing is tight, when fatigue creeps in, when training time is squeezed, “impossible” incidents start happening. Not because people suddenly stop caring, but because the system quietly becomes less resilient and less forgiving.
If that aircraft had taken off, everyone would have been asking how something so basic could fail. The only reason we are not asking it in the past tense is because passengers heard something and someone acted before it left the ground.
That is not a comforting lesson. It is a warning.
“It’s oversight, not operations” is not a comfort blanket
You will hear the same line again and again: the ICAO audit is about Transport Canada’s oversight, not airline safety. Transport Canada itself makes that point, and airlines have leaned on it.
Technically true. Practically incomplete.
If your oversight system is weak, you are not guaranteeing safety, you are hoping for it. You are relying on the best actors to keep doing the right thing, and on luck to cover what the system fails to catch.
An effective oversight regime is what ensures standards are not optional. It is what ensures that staffing, training, fatigue management, maintenance practices, and operational requirements are not things we discuss only after disruptions make headlines.
Transport Canada’s own public-facing material about the audit acknowledges “gaps related to oversight processes and regulatory framework,” and says corrective action plans are being implemented. That is the polite version. The blunt version is that the oversight system did not perform to the standard Canada should expect.
And this is where I keep coming back to ARFF. ARFF is where safety becomes physical and immediate. ARFF is not a policy document. It is trained people, on site, with specialized equipment, ready to make survivable outcomes possible in the minutes that matter.
You cannot “innovate” your way around missing firefighters. You cannot “risk manage” your way out of an empty fire hall. You cannot “culture” your way to a rescue.
Plans are not capacity
Transport Canada’s Departmental Results Report is explicit that the ICAO audit assessed Canada’s effective implementation of the eight critical elements of a safety oversight system, and that changes to the audit methodology included hundreds of protocol questions. It also says corrective actions are being implemented, and that ICAO’s validation work is meant to assess whether deficiencies have been resolved.
Again, fine. But here’s the problem: Canada loves plans. We love frameworks. We love the language of progress.
Capacity is not a plan.
A plan does not staff a fire hall.
A plan does not recruit and retain responders in hard-to-staff regions.
A plan does not create redundancy so a sick call does not become a service-level crisis.
A plan does not give workers breathing room so fatigue is not baked into the schedule.
A plan is paperwork. Capacity is people and funding.
If Canada wants to climb out of an oversight hole, it cannot do it with PowerPoints and internal working groups alone. It has to put real resources behind both the regulator and the front-line services that keep airports safe.
ARFF is where the margins become visible
In aviation, the public often thinks about safety in terms of aircraft and pilots. That is understandable. It is also incomplete.
Airport safety is a system. ARFF is one of the few parts of that system that ordinary people can understand instantly, because the logic is plain: if something goes wrong, you need skilled responders on scene immediately. Minutes matter. Tasks multiply. You need enough people to do suppression, maintain survivable egress routes, and support rescue simultaneously.
Mutual aid is valuable, but you cannot build an aviation safety system on “hopefully we can surge.” You cannot plan your worst day around the assumption that someone else will arrive fast enough, with the right equipment, trained to airport standards, ready to operate on the airfield, and available at that exact moment.
So when ARFF staffing drops, the system does not just get less comfortable. It becomes less resilient.
St. John’s showed what happens when staffing absences push an airport into limited operations and cancellations. Wabush showed how quickly firefighting and crash rescue capacity can become a limiting factor for which aircraft can even serve a community. And the Toronto to Moncton cargo-hold incident showed what it looks like when ground safety procedures fail in a way that should be unthinkable in a healthy system.
These are not three separate conversations. They are one conversation: what happens when safety-critical work is expected to run lean, indefinitely.
Transparency and accountability are missing
One reason this keeps happening is that we do not have routine transparency that matches the stakes.
We should not need a crisis, a viral video, or an international audit score to understand where the system is strained. We should have standardized reporting that tells the public how often airports operate at reduced ARFF levels, how long those periods last, and why. We should have a clear national picture of staffing, vacancy rates, training pipelines, retention challenges, and the operational consequences when coverage drops.
If safety depends on margins, transparency is not a luxury. It is accountability.
What a serious response would look like
If Canada wants to treat airport safety like something more than a press line, a serious response has to start with basics.
Stabilize ARFF capacity. That means treating ARFF as safety infrastructure, not discretionary overhead. It means building redundancy so the service does not crumble under predictable pressures.
Rebuild oversight capability. ICAO audited Canada’s oversight system and the score speaks for itself. Rebuilding oversight means more trained inspectors, stronger surveillance and follow-up, and the ability to enforce standards consistently, not selectively.
Make fatigue and training non-negotiable. Safety-critical work cannot be sustained on chronic overtime and goodwill. When the system runs on fatigue, the system becomes less reliable.
Publish meaningful operational transparency. If communities are going to depend on airports for medical travel, business, and basic connectivity, they deserve clear information about the reliability of the safety services that enable that connectivity.
Stop pretending “safety culture” replaces staffing. Culture matters. It does not drive a truck. It does not pull a line. It does not force entry. People do.
The bottom line
Canada can argue about what an ICAO oversight score does and does not mean. The nuance is real. It is not a direct airline safety audit.
But the score is still a warning. It is a measure of whether the country’s oversight machinery is functioning at a level Canadians should expect. When you pair that warning with real-world disruptions tied to firefighting and crash rescue capacity, and with procedural breakdowns that put workers at risk on the ramp, it starts to look less like a technical debate and more like a pattern.
Aviation safety is not something you can run lean forever without consequences. The bill always comes due. Sometimes it comes due as cancellations and disruptions. Sometimes it comes due as near misses and close calls that never make the news.
And sometimes it comes due on the worst day.
If Canada wants to avoid that day, we need to stop treating ARFF and airport safety as places where we can “do more with less.” We’ve already seen what “less” looks like. Now we have international evidence that the oversight system itself needs rebuilding. The only responsible move is to fund safety like we mean it.
Rob Silver