A House of Commons committee probing the Toyota Motor Corp. recall wants the company's top North American executive to testify, but the company's Canadian division insists its executives alone should answer questions about how the recall of about 270,000 of the company's vehicles was handled in Canada.
As the storm of negative publicity and lawsuits battering the auto maker rolled on, the Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities committee prepared to open hearings into the matter tomorrow, giving Canadian politicians their first chance to grill Transport Canada and Toyota Canada Inc. officials about the recalls and the issue of sudden acceleration.
Toyota Canada president Yoichi Tomihara and managing director Stephen Beatty are scheduled to testify next Tuesday after the committee hears from senior Transport Canada officials tomorrow.
But the Parliamentary committee chair, Conservative MP Merv Tweed, vice-chair Joe Volpe, a Liberal MP, aren't satisfied with this.
"We have asked for the North American president," Mr. Volpe said yesterday. "We want the people who are making the decisions for Toyota in North America, not Canada. We don't have any problem with somebody from Canada coming, but they're not the ones we want to talk to."
The committee hearings come as Toyota's efforts to debunk testimony from U.S. Congressional hearings last month were derailed by what appeared to be another incident of sudden acceleration.
The latest incident happened near San Diego, when a Prius roared up to 150 km an hour before a California Highway Patrol officer helped driver James Sikes bring it under control.
The incident with the runaway Prius happened just hours after a Toyota webcast and media presentation that sought to rebut testimony by a professor from Southern Illinois University, who told a U.S. committee last month that sudden acceleration in Toyota vehicles may be caused by problems with electronic throttle controls.
Toyota has been mired in a crisis since January, when it announced a recall and a halt in sales of its most popular North American cars to fix sticky gas pedals.
The recalls and the maelstrom of negative publicity, including investigations by the U.S. Congress and apologies by Toyota chief executive officer Akio Toyoda, have dented its once-sterling reputation for quality. That reputation helped vault Toyota into global auto sales leadership.
Mr. Toyoda testified at one Congressional hearing last month, as did Yoshi Inaba, CEO of Toyota Motor North America Inc. Mr. Tweed and Mr. Volpe want to hear from Mr. Inaba.
But Toyota Canada spokeswoman Sandy Di Felice said the Canadian unit does not control Mr. Inaba's schedule.
"Most importantly," Ms. Di Felice said, "the product and recall issues are the responsibility of Canada. Our executives should respond to questions from the committee. No one in the U.S. is in the line of Canadian decision making."
George Iny, president of the Automobile Protection Agency, a Canadian consumer group, said he wants the committee to seek evidence from "a defect investigations person with Transport Canada (not a professional manager) to talk about - in an non-political manner - potential improvements to increasing their capability to handle the crisis situations that occur every three to four years."
Toyota has asked a court in Michigan to overturn an order requiring Mr. Inaba and U.S. sales chief Jim Lentz to undergo examination for discovery tomorrow and Friday in one lawsuit, which involves the death of a woman driving a Camry during a 2008 accident.
The Michigan lawsuit is one of almost 100 U.S. court actions Toyota now faces involving acceleration or complaints by owners that the resale values of their vehicles have deteriorated because of the recall of more than eight million vehicles worldwide. There are at least three suits in Canada.
Both Toyota and the U.S. government's National Highway Transport Safety Authority dispatched technicians to California to examine the Prius involved in Monday's incident.
That incident appears to underline the confusion among consumers about which vehicles have been recalled.
Both Toyota Canada and Toyota Motor Sales USA had already issued recall notices for 2004-2009 model year Prius cars last year to address the possibility of sudden acceleration caused by floor mats jamming gas pedals.