Mr. Speaker, when I asked the government why it did not try to negotiate with the United States and demand reciprocity given that 2,000 American flights fly over Canadian airspace per day and only 100 Canadian flights fly over American airspace, the answer I received was that the Americans would take the information from our 100 flights a day and store it all in a multi-million dollar computer system. However, for us to take the information from the Americans on 2,000 flights a day would create a huge cost to our government for a similar computer system.
It sounds to me as though the government has decided that the cost is the issue here. The government is prepared to give the Americans the information because they are prepared to pay for the computer system but we do not think the information is important enough for us to fund a computer system to handle the information.
It seems to me that we just have very poor negotiators on the government side. They seem to simply be rolling over for the Americans in this situation. All they had to do was try for reciprocity and the Americans would have conceded issues because there would be a lot of pressure coming from American passengers, American airline workers and American airlines themselves. If they had to provide all of this information to Canadians there would be a revolt going on in the United States right now and a lot of pressure would be put on elected officials down there to back off on this demand. The government is clearly not negotiating in a very effective way.
I wonder if the member would like to comment on that.