Skip to content

Toyota officials apologize, but Ottawa says now investigating automaker’s action

Ottawa is investigating Toyota Canada over its handling of consumer concerns about the safety of its vehicles, Transport Minister John Baird said Tuesday.

OTTAWA — Ottawa is investigating Toyota Canada over its handling of consumer concerns about the safety of its vehicles, Transport Minister John Baird said Tuesday.

Baird met with reporters after Toyota officials were grilled by MPs during the morning over when it knew and when it reported it had problems with sticky gas pedals that could cause vehicles to unintentionally accelerate.

“What my department will do ... is investigate Toyota,” he said.

“Obviously, we use the criminal law power so as minister I can’t direct the department to conduct a criminal investigation and lay criminal charges on someone.”

He added that Transport Canada would review Toyota official testimony to the Commons committee earlier in the day based on Section 10 of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which deals with whether auto defects were properly reported and dealt with.

Baird said the government would also look into stiffening the law on notification of problems by automakers, based on “the facts” that emerge from his department’s and the committee’s findings.

Earlier, Toyota Canada officials extended an apology to Canadians about the safety problems of their vehicles, and admitted they could have notified the department sooner than they did in January.

Appearing before a Commons committee of MPs, Toyota executives conceded they were looking for a solution to a problem involving sticking gas pedals before they notified Transport Canada or the public.

Toyota Canada managing director Stephen Beatty said the company received five complaints, starting late last October, and ending Jan. 15, before notifying Transport Canada. A recall of 270,000 vehicles in Canada was ordered on Jan. 21.

Overall, Toyota recalled more than eight million Toyota and Lexus vehicles around the world, a move that will cost the giant automaker billions of dollars to fix and has tarnished its longstanding reputation for safety and reliability.

In a testy exchange with Conservative MP Jeff Watson, Beatty was asked why the company didn’t mention the sticky pedal complaints on Nov. 25, when officials met with Transport Canada over another matter, whether floor mats were affecting the accelerator.

“In retrospect, would it (have) been good to have had a dialogue about it (with Transport Canada). Maybe it would,” responded Beatty, but he nevertheless defended Toyota’s actions.

He said Toyota had still not confirmed it had a defect in the car at the time, only that it had “an issue” that it was investigating.

Under current law, he said, automakers are not required to report complaints to Transport Canada, only defects they have identified.

Officials were also asked why the head of Toyota, Kiichiro Toyoda, had apologized to the U.S. and China, but not Canada.

North American head Yoshi Inaba, who agreed only the day before to appear in Ottawa under pressure from the committee, said the previous apologies were meant for all countries..

But for MPs, the executives’ testimony left many questions unanswered, with several saying they were still not convinced Toyota had found the solution to the unintended acceleration problems in their cars.

Watson continued to pounce on Toyota’s delay in reporting the sticky pedal problems.

The Windsor area MP noted that Toyota had been in discussions with U.S.-based CTS Corp., which operates a parts plant in Ontario, about the pedals in December as part of an effort to find a solution.

The delay, said Watson, exposed Canadians to a serious safety issue.

“You know you’ve got a problem and you told nobody about it,” he charged.

About 270,000 recall notices were sent out in Canada, about 60 per cent of which have been completed, officials said.

Opposition MPs also pounced on the government for failing to take the situation seriously, and used an observation by Toyota officials that Transport Canada lacks resources, as evidence of government neglect.

“Transport Canada knew about this and the minister knew about this quite some time ago ... and Transport Canada had already compiled a list of all kinds of problems,” said Liberal critic Joe Volpe.

“Until about a week and a half ago, the minister said there’s no problem, we’re not going to beat up on Toyota.”

Volpe revealed that Transport Canada had received a total of 125 complaints about Toyotas, besides the 17 previously reported.

But Toyota officials responded by saying that many were unproven and stemmed from incidents dating several years back, which they said suggested that media publicity often drives customers to recall previous problems they may have ignored at the time.

Earlier, Beatty told the committee Toyota Canada ordered a voluntary recall of the floor mats in the fall not because it believed they presented a safety issue, but because there had been a recall in the U.S. and felt pressure to do something.

At one point, he held up the mats and explained why the Canadian version was different from the faulty U.S. one, particularly in the area near the gas pedal.

“We have 100 per cent confidence in the remedies we have put in place,” said Beatty.

Officials said they are also in the process of changing the decision-making process on recalls, removing the final say from the company’s Japanese headquarters to a four-person global committee on which North America has one representative.

Opposition MPs said they were still not convinced Toyota had gotten to the bottom of the accelerator problem, noting that in the United States many customers said their vehicles had not been fixed.

NDP critic Brian Masse, a former auto worker in Windsor, said he is concerned the fault lies with the cars’ software, an issue being investigated in the U.S. but not Canada.

“It’s really incredible that we have to rely on the American system to find out if there is going to be a computer or software problem related to the chip for acceleration. Transport Canada is not going to even investigate that,” said Masse.

He added that at the very least the government must change the system so that complaints received by automakers are immediately shared with Transport Canada.