Bill C-27 (Historical)

Canada Airports Act

An Act respecting airport authorities and other airport operators and amending other Acts

Question No. 206

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

I am informed as follows:

Finance Canada

The air transportation industry is under pressure globally. The events of 9/11 exacerbated a weak air market caused by a slowdown in global growth. The war in Iraq and the SARS outbreak intensified these challenges.

In the budget presented to the House of Commons on February 18, 2003, the government reduced the air travellers security charge for air travel within Canada from $12 to $7 for one way travel and from $24 to $14 for round trip travel. This represents a reduction of more than 40 per cent that will benefit all domestic travellers in Canada.

To help the tourism industry, the government committed $20 million to promote Canada as a business and leisure travel destination. The federal government is also working with the tourism industry and provinces to promote Canada. The government continues to review carefully the policy underpinnings for a safe, reliable and viable air transportation industry for Canada.

I am informed by Transport Canadaas follows:

The government has taken, and continues to take, the necessary action to stabilize the industry in the long term interest of travellers and airlines alike. For example, after the events of September 11, 2001, the federal government created a fund to compensate carriers for revenues that were lost during the closure of Canada’s airspace. Later, a number of carriers received funds to reinforce cockpit doors to promote safety and security. Air carriers also continue to benefit from relief from insurance costs since the government is still providing coverage for war risk insurance.

Furthermore, in March 2003 the government introduced Bill C-27, the new Canada Airports Act, that will provide airlines with more input into fees charged by airports. The government is also undertaking a review of airport rents, since those rents directly affect the amount charged by airport operators to airlines using the airport.

The government is also assessing recommendations with respect to relief for the industry made recently by the Standing Committee on Transport.

Business of the House

[Don Boudria, Liberal, Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, to answer the last question first, as to whether we need to have late night sittings, I suppose it depends on the co-operation on the part of the opposition, which is usually quite good, I must say.

Going to the substance for the next few days, we will continue this afternoon with the opposition day motion. The House does not sit tomorrow because of the Conservative leadership convention.

We are now entering June, the month when we try to wrap up the year's work and we will be consulting other House leaders on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, in order to determine the precise order of bills. However for the next few days we will be dealing mostly with report stages, third readings and consideration of Senate amendments to bills we have already passed.

The bills that will be considered next week will be, and I will start with the one on Monday, although we intend to have a minor conversation about another minor issue later, but generally speaking they will be as follows. We will start with Bill C-25, the public service bill. We will then move on to Bill C-31 respecting certain pensions for veterans and the RCMP. When that bill is completed I would hope to start Bill C-7 respecting first nations governance; and because they are all government days next week we are going to take them probably in roughly that sequence, Bill C-17 public safety; then Bill C-13, the reproductive technologies bill which is presently at third reading.

It would be my intention to then call Bill C-32, the Criminal Code amendments. When the bill is reported to the House, which hopefully will be one day next week, we could then commence Bill C-24, the political financing bill. We also have the amendments from the Senate which I understand might happen on Bill C-15, the lobbyist bill, and Bill C-10B, cruelty to animals.

At some point, we would also like to debate the second reading of Bill S-13, respecting the census, and Bill C-27, the airport bill.

As a matter of courtesy, I wish to indicate to colleagues that it is my intention to call the final supply day on or after June 12. This is not, of course, an official designation of that day at this point but that is why I say on or after, but at least to try and give an indication to colleagues in the event that they will not take other commitments at or about that particular time in order for them to be able to plan their agenda.

Canada Airports Act

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. Bélair)]

I wish to inform the hon. member that she still has 10 minutes in her speech and she will be entitled to a 10 minute question and comment period when debate resumes on Bill C-27.

It being 5.30 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of private members' business as listed on today's Order Paper.

[Sarmite Bulte, Liberal, Parkdale—High Park, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I too am very pleased to participate in the debate today on Bill C-27, the Canada airports act.

I will focus my remarks on part 6 of the bill. That part deals specifically with the main fees which are collected by airports. Part 6 establishes a brand new framework for amending existing fees or introducing new ones.

I am sure everyone will agree that one of the most significant concerns expressed by airlines and passengers alike has been the inability to consistently obtain a reasonable explanation of the fees being charged by airports across the country. Many times when I have travelled across the country, I have asked myself what certain fees were for. I am sure many other Canadians have experienced that same kind of feeling. I know that internationally other airports charge fees as well but we are always questioning the fees. We have paid for our tickets and in addition to that we have to pay another fee.

I am glad to announce that the new Canada airports act will actually address this shortcoming. It establishes a framework for fees that will provide users with the necessary information to understand each aeronautical and passenger fee. It also provides users an additional opportunity to influence the airport's decision making process each time these fees are amended or a new fee is being reconsidered. It is not that we just show up and the fee will be an additional $10 or $15. This framework will apply to all airports affected by the legislation and will deal only with two revenue sources on the airport.

First, there are the fees that are collected by airports from air carriers for the use of services and facilities and second, the fee collected directly from the passengers, which is usually called the airport improvement fee or the passenger facilitation fee. It is that fee which is annoying because we have to pull out our wallets to pay an additional fee as we are running to get on a plane. I think Canadians are most familiar with that fee.

There are four components to the framework and I would like to go through each one of them. First, it sets out charging principles to be followed in establishing these fees. Second, it has a charging methodology that the airport must develop to explain how each fee relates to the financial requirements of the airport. Third, it has a consultation process that is to be followed. Fourth, it gives an appeal process for users who claim that an airport operator has not complied with the charging principles or the prescribed consultation process.

The charging principles contained in the bill establish a minimum set of rules, and I underline minimum set of rules, that airport operators must follow with respect to fees.

These principles require airport operators to develop a charging methodology, to relate fees to costs so as to prevent overcharging users, to avoid discrimination in charging among users as required by Canada's international obligations, and to ensure that safety is in no way diminished by the fee structure.

With respect to the second component of the framework, each airport operator must develop and announce its charging methodology. This methodology must explain in detail the financial requirements of the airport that are to be met through fees and how each fee relates to these financial requirements.

Passenger fees attract specific reporting requirements under the legislation. Airport operators must identify the specific major capital program that the passenger fee is paying for and must also report how long the fee will be in place in relation to that program.

I have gone to certain airports which I have not been to in years and at that time there had been an airport improvement tax. I can understand when I see ongoing construction that there might be a need for this tax. However, it seems to me that years later when I have returned that same fee is still there and I cannot believe that they would have already started charging for a future improvement.

Passengers would finally have a feeling that there is some accountability here and that is very important. I should add that, for airports with fewer 400,000 passengers annually, revenues from passenger fees would be permitted to help pay for airport operations and maintenance costs as well.

It is important that we look at smaller airports and that a distinction is truly made. As in any type of industry, as a government, we must be careful that we take into account the fees or the operations of the smaller operators. As the former parliamentary secretary, I was involved with the Department of Canadian Heritage for the past two years. We always looked at the small broadcasters and the small cable operators because we had just finished a study at the Department of Canadian Heritage on the Broadcasting Act. We hope to table a report before the House recesses for the summer.

It is good to see that the government is establishing new policies, and that we are looking at ways to help the smaller businesses and smaller parts of our industry deal with the regulations. When we are speaking about regulations, one of the important things in the Speech from the Throne was our priority to ensure that we have smart regulations. The Prime Minister recently announced a special advisory board. It all fits into what we as a government are trying to accomplish under the act.

The third component of the framework provides airport operators with a minimum consultation process to be followed each time a fee is amended or a new fee introduced. That is so important. It is certainly something that we are constantly being badgered by the opposition. It says that we do not do enough consultation. It does not matter how much consultation we do, there never seems to be enough. It is important that we recognize that within this act we are requiring of airports the same kind of consultation process that we conduct and that we need as well in order to affect proper policy.

It is important for passengers to participate. I should note that the public will have the opportunity to review and comment on the justification for every fee proposal. The minimum review period of 60 days is similar to what is required today of the airport authorities pursuant to their leases with the federal government. There is indeed a precedent for those consultations and I welcome them. It is so important for consumers to know what it is they are paying for and how long they will be paying this as well. I commend the government on how it has reacted to the consultations that we have had to ensure that there continue to be consultations as the fees are collected.

Finally, I want to speak to the fourth component of the framework. The Canada airports act would permit users and passengers to appeal the decisions made by airport operators. The appeal process would be limited to appeals regarding compliance with the charging principles and with the consultation process. If passengers are not satisfied with the consultation process or how the charging principles have been involved, they have the opportunity to appeal. That is very important. If they feel they have been left out of the consultation process or it has not been done properly, there is that ability to appeal and that is important as well.

The Canadian Transportation Agency would hear these appeals and would be empowered to order airport operators to cancel a fee, but more importantly, they would have the opportunity to issue refunds to users if an appeal is successful. That is a wonderful opportunity. Canadians should know that they can be part of the process and actually get a refund if they find that the consultation process or the charging principles were not taken into account as required under the act.

To sum up, the act would establish for the first time a common set of rules that would guide airport operators in their management of fees and it would do so without being unduly prescriptive. Airport operators would still have the freedom to decide what their financial requirements are and how they would generate revenues to collect them. It is important that airports continue to have this freedom since many have borrowed where lenders have based their decisions on their knowledge of this freedom.

Finally, the focus of the legislation in this area of fees would promote transparency and provide a more consultative process for users. We believe that it would contribute to the efficient and effective management of Canada's critical airport infrastructure.

[Elsie Wayne, Progressive Conservative, Saint John, NB]

Mr. Speaker, I had the opportunity this past week to meet with the Atlantic provinces airport authority representatives who were here in Ottawa. They are very concerned about the bill. In fact they are saying that the bill will probably kill the airports in P.E.I. and many in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and in other smaller areas across the country. They have issues in so many areas that they wish to discuss.

The transport committee should be travelling across the nation. The bill should not be dealt with until the transport committee meets in all of those areas. Does the hon. member agree that the transport committee should go and listen to the many concerns of the airport authorities out there right now? If the committee does not, Bill C-27 will kill the airports in those smaller areas.

[Lynne Yelich, Canadian Alliance, Blackstrap, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to join today's debate on Bill C-27, the Canada airports act, a piece of legislation which in my mind is remarkable for what it does not do rather than for what it does do.

The air transportation system is a vital component of the economy not just here in Canada but on a global scale. Let me give the House some figures. Airports produce more than $34 billion in total economic activity each year. They generate more than $4 billion in tax revenues. Construction at major airports has attracted more than $5 billion in private sector capital investment.

That said, our airline industry is in a crisis. The number of passengers has decreased. Service has been cut. The need for security has overridden our desire for convenience, and costs are skyrocketing.

When I said Bill C-27 is notable for what it does not address, these are the issues that come to mind. Outrageous airport rents are one of the costs passed on to airlines and subsequently to consumers.

Starting in 2005 Saskatoon's airport, which serves the people in my riding, is expected to pay more than $500,000 in rent annually. Saskatoon Airport Authority representatives have said this is unaffordable and have recommended that rental charges should be scrapped in an effort to reduce the volatility of the airline industry. Other facilities such as Winnipeg International Airport will be hit even harder in the next few years. Rent there is expected to jump to $7 million by 2007.

According to the Canadian Airports Council, the 26 airports in the national airports system paid $240 million in rent to the federal government. That figure is expected to rise another $20 million this year.

The situation is a major concern to Canada's airports and a problem for the aviation industry in general. Federal rent, the single largest uncontrollable cost for most airports, drives up the price of the services that airports provide to customers.

By raising the cost of travel, this situation threatens the many benefits that have been realized from the transfer of NAS airports to local control in the early 1990s. Not only has the airport devolution process relieved the federal government of the responsibility and financial burden of managing airports in terms of capital and operations, it has enabled local communities to operate airports in a manner consistent with local needs. Despite the heavy burden airport rents put on the industry, the issue is not addressed in Bill C-27.

With air security having become such a headline issue following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, one would think by now that Canada would have a secure air system. After all, Canadians have been paying heavily for security ever since the air travellers security tax was introduced to fund tighter controls. Reality however tells a different story. The fact is our airports have become slightly more secure than they were. That is not to say they are secure, or that all airports have the same level of security. They do not.

One of the most obvious holes in our security is that in most cases once passengers enter the system, they are in regardless of whether they were screened at a large airport where security is naturally tighter, or at a small local airport where security is lax or even non-existent. Unlike in Europe, passengers entering the system from small centres are usually not re-screened. It certainly is not mandatory, even though such a practice could offer better security. Bill C-27 does not address this point.

Talking about security reminds me of fees. When the air travellers security charge is collected, it is held in trust, which means it is protected. It is not so for airport improvement fees which tend to be included in ticket prices and therefore collected by the airlines before being turned over to the appropriate airport authority. If the airline collecting that money falls into financial peril, there is no guarantee that the airport authority could collect the money it rightfully deserves.

Again, if I might use the Saskatoon Airport Authority as an example, when Air Canada slid into bankruptcy, it owed the Saskatoon Airport Authority about $300,000 worth of airport improvement fees. Because the airport authority stands as an unsecured creditor and the money was not held in trust, the authority could lose the entire amount. There is some indication that part of the money will be repaid, but the potential for losses is what I and the airport authority find disturbing. Again, Bill C-27 does nothing to ensure that airport authorities will receive the money the bill itself allows them to collect.

That addresses some of the opportunities that are overlooked in the bill. Now I would like to talk about what is in the bill.

When I look around me today I see people who travelled here from across the country. Some arrived by car or train, but it is likely most came to Ottawa by air. To get here each person made his or her way through at least two different airports in different communities. I suspect there were noticeable differences at each of those facilities. That is because, like the communities and the people they serve, each airport has its own unique profile. Some are large international hubs while others cater solely to domestic clientele.

Bill C-27 does not recognize those differences. In this attempt to re-legislate the current management practices at Canadian airports, the government has chosen to adopt a blanket approach that forces some of our smallest airports to match the obligations of their larger, busier, metropolitan counterparts.

No one within the air industry has called for such measures and I question why the government has chosen this path. The real irony is that within this blanket system, Bill C-27 proposes a two tier approach that will hold former national airport system airports to one set of rules while non-NAS airports will have to abide by another.

For example, clause 57 of the bill limits a former Transport Canada airport authority's ability to invest in another corporation to 2% of gross revenues per year.

Clauses 62 to 64 deal with the corporate governance of airports but do not require the board to have an airline industry representative. Again, this applies only to certain airports.

The proposed Canada airports act is flawed. It essentially re-regulates airports without any obvious benefits and does so in a way that does not reflect the unique needs and characteristics of our airports.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am surprised to hear those replies because Bill C-27 would establish principles for fees imposed by airport operators and my hon. colleague on the other side, along with his party, forever keeps criticizing the fees, whether they be high or low. The bill would look into the fees imposed by airport operators as defined in the legislation, including an appeal process to the Canadian Transportation Agency on future aeronautical and passenger fees that meet the past threshold.

I was under the impression that he had looked into this bill but from his comments, I feel that he has not looked at that part.

What about the creation of the adequate opportunity for users of airport facilities, including air carriers and the travelling public, to provide meaningful input into major airport decisions on charges--

[Gurmant Grewal, Canadian Alliance, Surrey Central, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary to the minister has prepared questions by bureaucrats and he is asking those questions, so his approach is naturally biased.

However let me put it like this. Bill C-27 overestimates or exaggerates problems which do not exist in the industry. We do not hear from the transport industry, the airport authorities or the stakeholders in the industry. It tries to solve those problems which do not exist and it does not do anything to solve those problems which already exist, like the problems I mentioned: the CARs 308 issue; the airport rent policy; the collecting of the airport improvement fee, which will be in trust and the bill does not do anything about that; the question of overly opulent terminals; the security issue; and the tax that smaller airports face in Canada.

How can the parliamentary secretary stand in the House and tell the House that the smaller airports can be governed and ruled by the same issues as the bigger airports? The smaller airports have different problems. One size fits all cannot be applied, regardless of the location or the size of the airport, it cannot be applied.

I urge the minister to look into those issues rather than having an arrogant approach to dealing with the airport authorities within Canada and having that tax grab which is a cash cow for the government continue.

At least the minister should look into the unanimous recommendations from the Standing Committee on Transport. which is a Liberal dominated committee. I am sure that the parliamentary secretary is aware of those recommendations and that he will look into them and apply them.

[Gurmant Grewal, Canadian Alliance, Surrey Central, BC]

Madam Speaker, I rise on behalf of the constituents of Surrey Central to participate in the debate on Bill C-27.

Before I begin, let me compliment the hard work done by our senior transportation critic on this issue in highlighting the problems related to this bill. Also, we will have a wonderful speech from the hon. member for Blackstrap with whom I will be sharing my time.

Bill C-27 is an act respecting airport authorities and other airport operators and amending the Canada Airports Act. Let me state that it is a combination of missed opportunities and attempts to solve problems that do not even exist.

When one looks at the state of Canada's airline industry and realizes that the Standing Committee on Transport is looking into the continued viability of the airline industry, one has to wonder why the government chose this time to introduce this legislation dealing with airports.

If we compare Canadian airports, both large and small, with similarly sized airports in other countries, the Canadian airports stand up rather well. At least there is no urgency or emergency to fix them. If something is not broken, why fix it? The real problem facing Canada's airline sector is not the way airports are run, but the way airport rent is charged by the federal government and passed on to the airlines.

This issue was raised and dealt with in the transportation committee hearings over the past few weeks. As a result, in an April 11 report this year the committee unanimously recommended that:

The federal government suspend rental payments by airports for a two-year period and the airports shall pass the rental savings to air carriers.

Further study is not needed. It is time to act. No one will find any discussion of airport rents in the Canada Airports Act.

In fact the Standing Committee on Transport made another unanimous recommendation to eliminate the air travellers security charge. This was connected to transferring responsibility for airport security to multi-modal agency that would be fully publicly funded. Here again an understanding of the nature of threats and security at small airports is helpful. Large airports have better security than smaller airports. The problem of course is that if the security is reduced at small airports but connecting passengers are allowed to proceed directly into the sterile or secure areas at big airports, the security of those large airports is compromised.

In Europe passengers arriving at places like Frankfurt, Paris or London from smaller centres are screened just like folks coming in off the street. They have to be screened before they enter the secure area of the airport to catch connecting flights. There is absolutely no mention of this idea in Bill C-27, even though it would offer better security at lower cost.

We are considering an airports act that applies to places as small as Gander with just 86,000 passengers and would also apply to any airport that has over 200,000 passengers annually. For most managers of small airports, the biggest single issue facing them is something call CARs 308. This is a recently imposed five minute emergency response time at smaller airports that has dramatically increased their operating costs. The federal government has not offered a dime in operating assistance and this unfunded federal government requirement is the biggest single issue facing many small airports.

The Regional Community Airports Coalition of Canada is calling on Transport Canada to suspend the introduction of CARs 308 indefinitely or to agree to pay for this regulation in its entirety to avoid the airports having to pass these increased operating costs on to the airlines. The coalition points out that these increased costs, applied in the form of a regulatory recovery fee, could increase airline fees at affected airports by up to 30% or higher. This will again affect the competitiveness and viability of the regional and community airports and therefore the communities they serve.

Other than the air security tax, the CARs 308 is the most important airport related issue missing in Bill C-27.

Part 6 of the Canada airports act deals with the issue of airport improvement fees. Essentially it subjects AIF to the same kind of accountability and appeal procedures that currently apply to Nav Canada fees. For airports just reaching the 200,000 passenger threshold, this will be a new level of bureaucracy, but I think that Canadians deserve to know how such fees are being spent.

If we held the Liberal government to the same standard, taxes like 1.5¢ per litre fuel tax that was aimed at cutting the deficit or the $24 air security tax would have to be much more accurately tailored to reasonable expenses, rather than a need to finance future Liberal spending or even the wasting of the money.

However even if one agrees with the general philosophy of the AIFs, the headlines that are dealing with this issue are not focusing on accountability but on the fact that the Air Canada restructuring has left many airport authorities in the red.

It seems that for many airports the AIF is included in the airline ticket prices and collected by the airlines and then handed over to the airport authority. Air Canada's financial problems are affecting many airports that trusted Air Canada to collect the AIF on their behalf. As of April 4, Canada's largest airports were owed a total $80 million in unpaid landing fees and airport improvement charges by Air Canada and that money is now tied up in the CCRA hearings.

However the air travellers security charge is not similarly affected, because Bill C-49 from last session required airlines to hold this money in trust. It does not require airlines, that collect the AIFs on behalf of many airports, to hold that money in trust as is done with the air travellers security charge.

Part 6, devoted to the question of AIF, we would think that the idea of any airline holding AIF money in trust so that airports would be paid even if the airline has a financial problem as in the case of Air Canada would have been included in Bill C-27, but it is not. This is another opportunity missed by this weak, arrogant Liberal government.

When we look at a list of priority airport issues facing the aviation industry, Bill C-27 misses virtually every opportunity to solve an existing problem. The government is trying to solve the problems that do not exist but it is not solving the problems that exist in the industry.

Bill C-27 is an attempt to codify the status quo in Canada's airline industry. This approach has two big problems.

The first is that there is no one out there calling for the status quo to be codified. No airline, airport authority or stakeholder is calling for legislation that would write down in one place the way Canada's various airports are run. It is an attempt to solve the problem that does not exist. Most of the language contained in Bill C-27 already exists in most of the leases that NAS airports have with Transport Canada. In many ways Bill C-27 is a complete waste of time.

The second big problem is that Bill C-27 would treat different airports similarly and similar airports differently causing true discrimination and causing far more problems than any codification of the status quo could potentially solve.

Since my time is almost over, let me conclude that a one size fits all solution, regardless of size and location, will not work.

Bill C-27 also fails to address major issues confronting airports, the CARs 308 issue, as I mentioned, the airport rental policy, the question of overly opulent terminals, the need for air industry representation and the need for the minister to get an arrogant airport authority to live within its mandate.

Bill C-27 is also introduced by the Minister of Transport who has repeatedly turned his back on unanimous recommendations by the committee to adopt the committee's recommendations as the department's priorities. The House should reject the legislation especially when, in cases such as this, it created more problems than it solves.

[John Bryden, Liberal, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot, ON]

Madam Speaker, I trust the member was not being sarcastic and that it was really an attempt at gentle humour, because actually I do feel that here in the Liberal backbenches we can have an impact and we can sometimes get an amendment put forward. I do hope that the member will move his own amendment on that in committee.

He gives me an opportunity to make a further comment. He triggers the comment by the reference to Nav Can. Possibly one of shortcomings in what we are trying to do here with this legislation, Bill C-27, is that by off-loading federal enterprises or federal ministries or federal responsibilities, shall we say, to the private sector, as in the case of the port authorities and the airport authorities, it is certainly true that if we put in the proper regimes for accountability we have enterprises that should run like a public business. My problem is that we lose the ability, however, to examine them internally with the Access to Information Act.

Nav Canada is a good example. To me it is not enough in the end that the airport authorities operators or the port authorities conform to the standards set out in Bills C-44 and C-27. What we really need to do is to bring these arm's length institutions under the Access to Information Act so that we do not just see audited financial statements, so that we do not just see the numbers. Those things are important, but what we really need to be able see is that there is no nepotism in the operation, that there is no fundamental mismanagement.

One of the reasons why I campaigned so vigorously to reform the Access to Information Act is not that I believe the bureaucratic part of government is being run so badly. There are a lot of checks and balances in the way government ministries are actually operating in delivering services to people. What concerns me is this terrible movement in the provinces and in Ottawa here in the federal government to off-load the provision of services to arm's length organizations, be it the CRTC, Nav Canada, or these airport authorities, because they are then out of the reach of the Access to Information Act. They are out of the reach of our ability to really ensure in the public interest that they are being managed appropriately.

So my ultimate target in trying to reform the Access to Information Act is to create a model, particularly with crown corporations, that could be applied to institutions like these authorities we are talking about and that ultimately could be adopted by the private sector. Because I really do believe that in this global economy where competition is everything and survival is everything, how one wins in the global market is not just by one's prices but by one's efficiency as a corporation.

I think that Canadian corporations have much to gain if the Canadian government can lead the way to harness the Internet so that there can be protocols of transparency the likes of which have never been seen before. I think that will enable Canadian enterprises, both public and private, to lead the world in their ability to compete.

[James Moore, Canadian Alliance, Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have a brief comment. It is something that the member might want to consider. I know that Hamilton airport, particularly since WestJet began flying in there, has been very helpful to his region of the province. He is not a member for Hamilton, he is the member for Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot, but it certainly has been very important.

There is a model that the government should consider and I am pleased that the parliamentary secretary is here and will be considering Bill C-27 at committee. The model the Canadian Alliance would like to see is a model that the government has used before. The model is that of Nav Canada. Again, a government corporation goes into private hands, and the board of Nav Canada that is now being used is the proper model for airport authorities themselves, perhaps with some slight modifications. The model of Nav Canada has the airlines in it themselves. What was understood was that the fees of Nav Canada can be a detriment to the airline industry, as we have seen in the short term. That is something certainly my colleague can comment on. I have another question, but I wanted to present that as an alternative. With his considerable weight, influence and power within the Liberal Party, I hope he can draft that amendment and get it passed just like that.

[James Moore, Canadian Alliance, Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Madam Speaker, I have a question for my colleague. I agreed with him when he mentioned at the end of his talk that when airports go from being government run to essentially private sector corporations they are essentially monopolies and therefore there has to be regulation of these monopolies.

What Bill C-27 does is mandate the makeup of the boards of directors of these companies to ensure that all the voices are heard, but the number one problem with the current composition of the boards of the airport authorities is that the air carriers and the air industry do not have representation on those boards. Because of the inelasticity of the price of airline tickets and because it is so competitive and so on the margin, the ability for airports themselves and airport authorities to impose airport improvement fees without receiving those measured opinions through a specific mandate on the boards of directors is a huge flaw in the bill.

I see that the member is taking a minute to flip through the bill. I want him to go to that section if he has a moment. That is a principal problem with the bill, because the air industry wants a greater say in this country. It wants a greater say with how airport authorities are managed because there is a real problem.

For example, we get complaints, and whether they are justified or not I will not say, about the Vancouver International Airport, which is a great airport. Larry Berg is the CEO and he does an amazing job. He is a great guy and does a great job of managing the airport. However, we receive a lot of complaints from smaller carriers and even Air Canada about Vancouver International Airport essentially becoming a giant mall with boutiques and restaurants and stores and tie shops and everything else, rather than just a port of entry and exit for airlines.

The federal government says it needs to regulate that because it is getting out of control, but it has not put air carriers and the air industry on the boards of the airport authorities, which is a fatal flaw. It is one thing to say there has to be management. However, not to have the air carriers there in order to make the argument about the inelasticity of prices and the problems of airport improvement fees is a fatal flaw in the bill.

[John Bryden, Liberal, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot, ON]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-27 because as the House is aware I have been a long proponent of increasing transparency and accountability in the financial administration of government and crown corporations. Indeed, it is a principle that I would apply to any kind of institution that is charged with looking after the public trust, whether it is a private corporation, a crown corporation or a government.

This business of transparency and accountability has come to be rather accepted in this day and age, particularly after the public collapses in the United States of large corporations like Enron. The idea that institutions should be foremostly transparent and accountable is somewhat novel in comparison to the situation of just 10 years ago.

When I first came to this House in 1993 and started this crusade to bring transparency and accountability to everything the government touched, part of that crusade was to reform the Access to Information Act and to amend the Canada Business Corporations Act, and do a number of things including bringing transparency and accountability to charitable institutions.

I guess I was a voice in the wilderness originally but as time went on the government, I am happy to say, has bought more and more into the principle that there must be legislated transparency and accountability wherever taxpayers' money is being spent or wherever the public trust is being looked after in a way that involves finances.

In 1994, the first year of the government's mandate, the government took over a program that had been initiated by the former Tory government. It was the implementation of the national airport policy. That involved taking federal airports and transferring them through specific agreements to local authorities who in turn often hired or came into agreements with private operators to run these airports. This legislation deals with these entities. In the grand sense the entity that runs, for example, Pearson airport is an airport authority in this legislation. There is also a smaller category of airport operator which by and large applies to John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport in my riding in Hamilton.

When those agreements were struck across the country that basically semi-privatized the federal airports, the principle of ensuring that there was a single standard of corporate governance, a single standard of financial reporting, and a single standard of disclosure to the public was not implemented at that time. These airport authorities and airport operators were set up with different types of standards. Over the nine years since these airport authorities and airport operators have been operating, it has become apparent that the level of disclosure and the level of transparency has been uneven across the country. There have been some concerns expressed about the management of some of these airport authorities and airport operators.

In 1996 the government embarked upon a similar program to transfer the federal marine assets over to port authorities. In my riding the Hamilton Harbour Commission was replaced by the Hamilton Port Authority. The difference between 1994 and 1996 was that the government inserted into the legislation, creating the port authorities, excellent standards of corporate governance, transparency and accountability. I was very proud at that time because I would like to think I had some role in that because I was pestering the minister of the day about the necessity of bringing that type of standard in with the port authorities.

We now have Bill C-27 which, nine years later, is the logical step to take after bringing the regimes of corporate governance to port authorities and bringing them to airport authorities and airport operators. It is a good thing to do.

I have been following the debate in the House and I cannot fail but note that even on my own side there have been colleagues who have criticized Bill C-27 and have spoken against it. I must cite the member for Hamilton West who is a colleague of mine. On an earlier day of debate he gave a speech on the bill in which he castigated the government for this legislation. I must note that nowhere in his speech did he actually cite a single criticism of the legislation. He decried it in general but not in specifics.

It is important for people watching to know that even on this side of the House there is great freedom of opinion and we are able to debate openly. I do not begrudge my colleague's opinion about the legislation, but it was his remarks that prompted me more than anything else to set the record straight in my view, and remember, Madam Speaker, it is my view.

I would like to take members of the House through a bit of the legislation to give them an impression of what the legislation actually does and why I think everyone in the House should support it. There may be areas that could use some technical amendments, but by and large, I think it is excellent legislation.

I draw the House's attention to part 5 of the bill under the heading “Disclosure and Accountability”. Clause 120 would require all airport operators to prepare financial statements annually. In those financial statements there must be a statement of revenues and expenditures, a summary of capital expenditures, and a statement of revenues from passenger fees. This is important information because we must remember that these airports, even though they are operated locally, are institutions of the public trust. In other words, every airport is derived ultimately from the Crown, so the public would expect to have access to that kind of information.

Clause 123 would require every airport operator to submit a business plan for the upcoming five years. I am probably a bit fanatical about the need for financial disclosure with the public and institutions, including private corporations. The legislation would require that the airport authority or airport operator provide annual financial statements. The legislation goes into great detail about what is required in these financial statements. It says, for example, that financial statements must disclose the revenues derived from landing fees, terminal fees, other aeronautical fees, passenger fees, and from car parking concessions and general rental.

This is a very important part of understanding the success of an institution, a business enterprise in this case being operated in the public interest. It is very important because ultimately these airport properties are a resource of the nation. It is very important for the public to be able to see for themselves through audited financial statements how effectively the airport operator is carrying out its task. I submit that this detailed requirement is an excellent provision to put in the legislation.

This is not to say that many airport operators are not providing this kind of information already. The important thing is that it is a standard that goes across all airport operators including the one in Hamilton and many others. Therefore, it is a very positive thing.

A little further in the bill we would expect to see and indeed we do find that there has to be an auditor's report of the financial statements. That of course should be a given. I am sure it is in most airport agreements, if not all, but it is very important to put it in legislation.

There is also a provision for regular annual meetings. A very good idea, that was derived from the port authority legislation which incidentally was Bill C-44 in its day, is this idea that every so often the airport authority must submit itself to a performance review. That performance review of its operations and everything that it is doing and the way it is carrying out business is to be done by an independent agent. That again is a very positive thing to do. I think the public must be satisfied that there is transparency and accountability.

However, realizing that not everyone is going to be scrutinizing the financial statements of the airport operator every time they come out, we must assure ourselves that there is something built into the system to ensure that there is an annual independent assessment of how well management is performing its task.

It is something that the government is very used to. We certainly have a system in the government where the performance of various departments are subject to annual review and indeed we apply it to many pieces of legislation. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act is a good case in point because it was just in the House this week. This is legislation that comes up for review every five years. The Lobbyists Registration Act is another example. In the operation of government itself various departments have mechanisms in place to review performance from time to time. Therefore, I think this is very positive.

There is also material here regarding the mechanism for setting airport fees. Again, that is very important because we do not want a situation where an airport operator can arbitrarily set fees that may help generate revenue but may have a negative impact on passenger travel or access to the airport or whatever else. Airports like ports are not simply business enterprises. They are enterprises that have great national significance and they cannot be administered totally in isolation of national policy. This is why Bill C-27 has come forward.

Obviously I quite support the bill and I would like to put it also in the context of another piece of legislation that is coming before the House; it is in committee. That is Bill C-7, which is a bill that will bring financial transparency and accountability to the administration of Indian reserves. Some 600 bands and reserves are going to be covered by this legislation. What it basically does is put standards where none existed before, national standards pertaining to the election of officers of bands, their requirement to disclose their proceedings to their band membership, the need for audited financial statements and so forth.

The reason why I mention it is that this is part of where the government has been going in the last few years and I am extremely pleased that it is going in this direction. More and more, we see the government moving toward patching up areas of the national fabric that have existed for many years without adequate oversight. Because when we talk about transparency and accountability, what we are really talking about is public oversight of enterprises that are in the national interest.

Bill C-7, Bill C-27 and the bill on the port authorities represent very important progress on the part of the government in this direction. That gives me an opportunity to encourage the government to carry on in this direction, because there is much more to be done. I remind the House that I have been campaigning very hard over many years to persuade the government to reform the Access to Information Act. That would bring greater transparency, accountability and scrutiny, shall we say, to the administration of government. This was pioneering legislation in its day. It needs overhaul very desperately and I hope the government will move in that direction very shortly. I would rather it did it immediately because time is running out on this particular government's mandate.

There is another area that I really wish the government would move forward on. It has been very slow and I find it very unfortunate. It is the whole idea of bringing in standards of accountability, transparency and corporate governance to charities. It is just like port authorities, just like airport authorities. Charities are large enterprises that spend billions of taxpayers' dollars.

I believe the charity sector in this country, which we can rightly call an industry, has revenues and expenditures in the order of about $100 billion a year. This is a huge amount. These charitable institutions, be they large hospitals or the small charity that gets on the telephone to us, or usually to our aged parents who cannot think very clearly for themselves, and solicit money and spend that money, these organizations are still not under meaningful, legislated standards of corporate governance and transparence. I know that sounds incredible. Canadians listening probably think it is absolutely amazing that a $100 billion a year industry should be without the basic standards of corporate governance that exist in this legislation.

Finally I would say in conclusion that the government is moving in the right direction. This is what Canadians want. This is what society wants. I think it is very clear from the catastrophes in the financial market, particularly in the United States, that we cannot rely on trust alone to ensure that enterprises that are acting in the public interest are living up to their commitments. So we must bring in legislation that defines standards of corporate governance and deals with transparency and accountability. I think Bill C-27 is a good step in that direction, but there is much, much more to be done.

[Jim Abbott, Canadian Alliance, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is very interesting to follow my seatmate, my colleague here, and his comments.

On the issue of the Cranbrook airport, when the city of Cranbrook took over the airport response times were stipulated at that point. Now, as we have just been discussing, response times are totally different . What it basically means is that there was an absolutely unpredictable, unforecastable expense that is now facing the city of Cranbrook and the Cranbrook airport.

I want to speak briefly, in the context of Bill C-27, about the city of Cranbrook and the Cranbrook airport. It is unique, as are all smaller airports, I am sure. It is unique in the fact that the overall airport traffic in the early eighties was approximately 155,000 passengers and today it is down to under 90,000 travelling passengers. This is a combination of two things.

One thing is that at that time, in the early eighties, with the amount of development that was happening in the Crow's Nest and people coming to the Cranbrook airport in 737s from Vancouver and Calgary and then going on up to the Crow's Nest, we had a very large volume of people coming through the airport. That development work has stabilized and now, as a result, we have a very solid employment base. My constituency, I should say, produces about a quarter of the world's metallurgical coal. Therefore, the development has taken place.

Now we end up with the situation that the airlines have chosen, to downgrade from 737s to Dash 8 300s, Dash 8 100s, Beechcraft 1900s and so on, the imperative being that the fewer the number of passengers on the plane the lower the landing fee. Therefore, because the landing fees have been increasing, they have been decreasing the number of passengers as they have been able to.

At the same time the government has consistently increased the taxes on airline travel, to the point that now it costs over $700 for a round trip between Cranbrook and Vancouver. It is absolutely outrageous. Furthermore, most people end up leaving the Cranbrook area, driving over to Calgary and taking advantage of WestJet and other discount carriers in the area.

In response to that, and because we have so many worldclass recreation facilities, unimaginable ski hills, golf courses, everything anyone could possibly want in the form of recreation in our area, a proposal has been put forward to extend the Cranbrook airport runway from 6,000 feet to 9,000 feet. That would permit charter planes as large as 767s to fly directly from Europe into the Cranbrook airport, thereby bypassing Calgary and coming directly to the worldclass resorts that exist in my constituency.

It is a very worthy and worthwhile project but one can see how, with Bill C-27, which is basically a one size fits all kind of legislation, the requirements for the Cranbrook airport and the rules and regulations that will flow from Bill C-27, which will impact the Cranbrook airport, will be so substantially different than the regulations that would be in Castlegar in the west Kootenays, Cranbrook of course being in the east Kootenays, or I could refer to Lethbridge, which would be the next smaller airport to the east. The requirements for the Cranbrook airport will be so substantially different to the requirements for the Castlegar airport and Lethbridge airport that it is impossible under Bill C-27 to come up with any possible way of establishing proper rules and regulations that would fit all.

I want to read from a briefing note about the Vancouver airport authority. The reason I want to read about that is that the Vancouver airport authority airport services, YVRAS, is an organization that has taken over the management of the Cranbrook airport.

Under section 57, the bill would limit an airport authority's ability to invest in another corporation to 2% of gross revenue a year. The YVRAS is concerned that this clause would limit its ability to finance its projects in Chile, Jamaica, Hamilton and, I am sure if we are successful in the current negotiations, the project in Cranbrook at the same time. YVR writes:

...investment opportunities do not come in neat bundles, nor do they arise every year. This is also a demonstration of an “Ottawa knows better” than the community based board about what is good for the community.

This is part of the one size fits all, only it is more specific to the management of the Cranbrook airport. YVR has been doing a credible job for us. There is a responsibility to the citizens of Cranbrook at this particular time.

With ongoing negotiations between the City of Cranbrook, the Regional District of East Kootenay and other municipalities, as well as provincial and federal governments, to possibly fund the issue of getting the 9,000 foot runway, this insecurity over the funding and the backing of YVRAS is a significant concern to me, representing the people of the east Kootenays.

This bill, as with all bills, misses opportunities. We are looking at the fact that under airport fees, for example, we know that the Cranbrook airport, along with many others, has been hit badly by the Air Canada bankruptcy. The difficulty is that many of the funds were not in a place of trust. If they had been put into a place of trust, these smaller airports would not have been hit in that way.

Although this bill is a sincere attempt on the part of the government, it is seriously flawed and should go back to the drawing board.

[Charlie Penson, Canadian Alliance, Peace River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today and speak on this bill, one that certainly affects an airport in my riding in the city of Grande Prairie.

I believe that the bill is actually a bill of missed opportunities and attempts to solve problems that do not really exist. When one looks at the state of Canada's airline industry and realizes that the Standing Committee on Transport is looking into the continued viability of the airline industry, one has to wonder why the government is choosing this time to introduce legislation dealing with airports, and specifically this type of legislation.

Based upon e-mails, phone calls and letters that my office receives, there is no real sense of urgency to fix the airport situation except for three specific areas that I am going to discuss today and which really are not addressed in this bill at all. In fact, most Canadians are reasonably happy with the status quo. When we compare Canadian airports, both large and small, with similarly sized airports in other countries, Canada's airports stand up rather well. So the question is, if the system is not broken, why are we trying to fix it?

What I believe is happening is that this really is about a missed opportunity to fix three specific problems that are not addressed in the bill. The real problem facing Canada's airline sector is not the way airports are run, because they largely have been turned over to airport authorities and down to a level of community involvement that I think is much better than it was before. The real question is about the way rents are charged by the federal government to these airport authorities and how that cost is passed on to the airlines.

This issue was raised and dealt with in the transport committee hearings over the past few weeks. As a result, on April 11, in its report, the committee recommended unanimously that “the federal government suspend rental payments by airports for a two year period” and that “the airports shall pass these rental savings on to air carriers”. We know that air carriers are experiencing some difficulty during this time. Further study is not needed. It is time to act.

However, we will not find any discussion of airport rents in the Canada airports act, Bill C-27. In fact, the Standing Committee on Transport made another unanimous recommendation: to eliminate the air travellers security charge. This was connected to transferring responsibility from airport security to a multi-modal agency that would be fully publicly funded.

The airport security issue is an important one, but we do not charge other people in our society for the cost of security, specifically those sectors. If we look to the model of why this was put in to begin with, on September 11 in the United States there were more people killed on the ground than there were in airplanes and specifically in airports. Security is a huge issue but it should be one that is taken out of general revenue.

Here again, understanding the nature of security at small airports is helpful. Just as a bank has a better security system than a Kool-Aid stand, large airports have better security than smaller airports. In fact, I was in New Zealand just recently and people who travel within the country of New Zealand have no screening at all. Only if they have connections to international flights are they subject to screening. Some cities like Winnipeg have been trying that model, and I think it is a model that would help save some money here in Canada.

The reason I am here today to speak to this bill is that I have a vested interest. I have to confess that quite frankly. My vested interest is that I have an airport in my riding. The airport is in Grande Prairie, Alberta and it is very concerned about the cost the federal government is imposing upon it through what is commonly known as CARs.

This is a situation whereby the federal government is now imposing on smaller airports a five minute emergency response time. One might ask what is wrong with that, but the fact of the matter is that about five or six years ago, when the federal government decided it wanted to offload the airports onto the municipalities and airport authorities, it told those same airports that they would not need to have firefighting units at the airports themselves. They could have them within about a 7 minute to 10 minute timeframe in a nearby city such as Grande Prairie. The airport is almost a suburb of the city of Grande Prairie. So the firefighting department at the airport was closed down. There were considerable savings, which were transferred to the city when it agreed to take over the airport authority as a result of that. That was one of the enticing factors that the federal government used with small airports, quite frankly, to convince the airport authorities to start managing them themselves.

Why has it decided to go back into this business of having these firefighting units right at the airport? Because there was an incident, I think it was in Moncton, a few years ago. Quite frankly I do not believe that even a firefighting unit at that airport would have resolved that problem. However because there was some negative publicity, all of a sudden the federal government reneged on its promises to the airport authorities and told them that they had to go back to this. All the savings that were realized, that were part of the deal that the government offered to take over this airport, now had to be paid for themselves.

I do not think that is fair to small airports such as Fort St. John, Grande Prairie and Fort McMurray. I think a number of airport managers are coming to Ottawa shortly to make this case themselves to the transport minister. If the Minister of Transport wants that kind of response time at the airport and if they are going to have to put in these capital expenditures again after it was all dismantled as a result of the minister convincing these small airport authorities to do just that, then I suggest he and the Government of Canada better pay those costs.

I personally do not believe a five minute response time is necessary in a city like Grande Prairie where the airport is located just on the outskirts of the city. The response time there for firefighting is about a seven minute but that is not good enough for the federal government. There is a huge cost of roughly $500,000 a year which that airport authority will have to incur.

There is an issue of fairness here. This is the government that convinced these people, like the airport authority of the city of Grande Prairie, that it should take over the airport. It was downloaded from the Minister of Transport because government was trying to save some money at a time when there was a cost cutting necessity. I have no objection to that but do not impose rules that change the conditions of that transaction which happened only a very short time ago. That is not fair. That changes the rules and puts airports in a position where they cannot operate effectively. If they have to put this capital expenditure in, companies like WestJet will be charged additional fees.

WestJet flies to Edmonton. It is about a half an hour flight by jet. It is a four hour drive. All of a sudden the cost starts to go up. Airport improvement fees, the security tax that the federal government is still imposing on airlines, now there is the added cost of CARs and pretty soon it does not become economical for companies like WestJet to fly to Grande Prairie. What happens is a substantial sector of the economy that makes it very attractive for business people to come to Grande Prairie by jet is killed. Business people will have to charter a plane or a scheduled flight that does not utilize jet traffic because these companies will have been priced out of business.

The government charges such as the airport security tax, airport improvement fees and all the other taxes represent a higher cost than the actual cost of the ticket itself from a company like WestJet. That is not acceptable, particularly when it was this government that told the airport authorities that if they took over the airports, they would not have to have these five minute firefighting response times with facilities right at the airport. They were told they could have it in the city, a short distance away. Now it is changing the rules and that is not fair.

This should be rejected. I know the Canadian Alliance will vote against it and I personally urge other members in the House to do just that because this issue is really an issue of fairness and the government is not living up to its responsibilities.

[Ken Epp, Canadian Alliance, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I had another question but the member will now escape from our questioning and we will not get an answer.

However, with respect to the appointment of the airport authorities, I will simply say that I sincerely hope the Liberals will support the amendment. The member says over and over that they may be there, and that is true. I am not questioning or arguing that. That is in fact what the bill says and that is what we find particularly problematic. I do not see them applying that same criteria to the appointment from the government.

The bill mandates that the airport authority directors will include two representatives from the federal government. There it is. It is mandated. Why do the Liberals not just say that they may be from the federal government if they are happy with that? They think it is so important that there be two members from the federal government that they put it in the bill. One director must be from the provincial government in the province in which the airport is located. It is mandated that between three and five of the directors must be from the municipality.

I am very disappointed in the lack of a positive response from the Liberal member who just spoke. If those are important, and I agree they are, it says in the legislation that the board will contain members from these different groups, then why suddenly make it optional for the airline industry itself? Can anyone imagine the airport authorities not having this input? It is a distinct possibility because the word is that they may be there. They do not have to be.

I and probably most of my colleagues would argue very strongly that it is absolutely mandatory. In fact, I would go so far as to say that to have the airline industry represented on these authority boards is actually more important than to have a federal representative. It is more important than to have a provincial representative. It is just a very bad error in the bill.

Of course, I expect my colleague, the member for Port Moody--Coquitlam--Port Coquitlam, will be bringing forward in committee some amendments to that effect, but we are here today debating in principle this bill. That is what second reading is all about. In principle we cannot even accept the bill if it has these very serious flaws. It is flawed in principle if it does not include mandatory representation from the airline industry or general aviation, as is required on the board of NAV Canada.

We have the precedent. There is no reason why these mighty, numerous Liberals cannot support such an amendment. I guess I am putting forward here the initial argument that it would be worth their while. It would be a good thing for them to support such an amendment.

Now we all know the way the parliamentary dysfunctional system works here, and that is that even if we were able to persuade the members of the committee to support such an amendment, lo and behold, we would find ourselves in the House at report stage and, undoubtedly, the government would put in amendments at report stage that would undo the amendments accepted at committee. We have seen that over and over again. It is one of the great frustrations.

I will digress and speak generally for a few moments about this whole process. I think this is fundamentally where we need to change this place. Our job is to produce good legislation. In fact, unbeknownst to the public, before the doors are opened and before the cameras are switched on every day we have a prayer in the House of Commons. We pray for divine guidance and ask for help to make good laws and wise decisions.

We want to make good laws but we cannot do that if there is no practical mechanism for implementing amendments derived from the collective wisdom of members of Parliament in the House and in the committee dealing with the legislation.

I am presuming that the second reading of Bill C-27 will pass. There will be no dissenting vote to speak of from the Liberal side. If there is any dissent it means that one or two members have chosen to absent themselves from the vote because they did not want to incur the wrath of the Liberal Party whip. They will all vote for it in sufficient numbers that it will pass.

How then have we fulfilled our mandate, having been sent here by the people of Canada to produce a good law, if we cannot improve and revise such an obvious huge flaw?

A bunch of Liberals over there are supporting the member for LaSalle--Émard who has been going around the country telling people that he will reform Parliament. Big deal. He is saying that now in order to get elected. That is what the Liberals did when they were seeking election in 1993. At that time they said they would have an independent ethics counsellor. Ten years later we have a totally dependent ethics counsellor. The former finance minister is now saying that he will make Parliament more accountable and individual MPs more responsible. We have heard that story before and, frankly, I do not believe it.

When we propose amendments to the bill we may be able to, because of the current internal party conflict, persuade members of the committee to vote in favour of those amendments. That has happened before. However they will come back here and all the work will be undone. The bill will be passed in its flawed form rather than its improved form. I cannot understand that.

It is a mark of pride and arrogance to say that my first try at anything is right and good and I will not change it. Every other week I write letters to people in my riding and those letters are published in my local newspapers. I hardly ever send my first draft. I should not say never because occasionally I do. I get on a roll and I usually get it pretty good the first time. However usually it is edited and revised before I send it. We need to be able to do that here. We need to be able to tell Canadians that the first draft came out this way but we, being the diligent politicians that we are, detected some flaws and corrected the flaws before the bill was passed into law. That is our duty. I hope Liberal members will carry out that duty. I hope they will do their duty and support the required amendments.

It is also interesting to note that in this particular instance the committee presented a report to the House of Commons. However, when all is said and done, there will be substantial changes made to the report in terms of the government's response to it.

I want to say a few other things about the bill we are dealing with today, Bill C-27. It seems to me that taxpayers are being royally ripped off. In general I agree that it is a good plan to privatize the airports. Airports generally are being administered as well or better by the local authorities than they were by the federal government. That is a generalization. There would be some exceptions to that statement.

The poor taxpayers are caught in this because, first, we built all these airports through our taxes. Now that we have built them they have been given over to the local authorities. I would hasten to add that in every instance that I know of they were given over at well below market value. I do not think any local authority paid anywhere near the market value of the land and the improvements of the airports which they took over. Now in every instance we as taxpayers get to pay rent on the land that we originally bought and improved.

Mr. Speaker, I do not think you or I would do that. I cannot imagine building an apartment block and then selling it to some entrepreneur for about one-tenth of the price, and then turning around and going back there to live and paying one and a half times as much rent as I would pay normally anywhere else.

Yet we know that many of these local authorities are paying rent to the federal government far in excess of what the federal government is doing. Basically they own the airport property and they are paying this rent but the fact of the matter is that it is the taxpayer who paid for the property and the improvements in the first place. Now it is the taxpayers, through their local governments, and the people flying and paying the airport taxes who end up paying again.

This is how it always is with the Liberal government. We pay once and then we pay again and again. The government almost has a fetish for collecting taxes over and over. We still have the GST which it promised to kill and to scrap. The GST is actually charged on fees and taxes. We pay a fee, we pay a tax and then on top of that, when the bill is all added up, another 7% is added and it is called the GST.

Therefore much of the tax that we pay is actually a tax on the tax. This happens over and over in our country. The government says that it is such a wise fiscal manager that it no longer has increasing debt. I commend the government for that. It could hardly help it with the way the economy has been rolling due to free trade, which has had the greatest impact.

Free trade was another thing the government said it would scrap. It was against free trade. Now it is the beneficiary of it and telling the Canadian people that it is no longer borrowing and no longer in deficit because it is such a great financial manager.

I guess I would concede to the degree that the government is a good enough manager to not undo the good that was done before it got here. I commend the government for that. I thank the government for keeping the free trade growing instead of scrapping it, for not keeping that particular election promise, otherwise we would be in real deep trouble economically in this country.

I would also like to mention the government's fetish to get into micro-managing. There are two areas in the bill. I have mentioned them before in debate and in questions and comments with previous speakers. However I am truly one upset guy about this. The government cannot put into the bill that it is mandatory that there be airline representatives on the board but it can put into the bill that it is mandatory to fly a Canadian flag.

I have a particular soft spot in my heart for this issue. As you know, Mr. Speaker, as do many other members and maybe some others watching on television, I became part of the so-called flag debate here about seven or eight years ago with members of the Bloc, God love them. There are wonderful members of the Bloc. I like them as individuals. They are fine, respectable people but I disagree with their political philosophy. They want to separate from Canada and I strongly disagree with that. We need to stay together and be a large, strong and happy family. A Bloc member at that time objected to the fact that I had a little flag on my desk. I got into trouble and I apologized for it at the time because it was considered a prop.

A Canadian flag in our own House of Commons is considered a prop, an offensive symbol. It is quite inconsistent, Mr. Speaker, since you have one right beside you and it is most appropriate that it should be there. However for me to have a little one here was considered offensive.

When a Bloc member, a separatist member, demanded from the Speaker that I remove it, I had a short regression to the rebellion of my youth, that type of response. I said “Ain't no Bloc member gonna tell me not to fly my flag” and so I flew it. I did not remove it. Like I said, I subsequently apologized for defying the authority of the Speaker in the House when I was asked to remove it. That part was wrong. However it was much more wrong for a member of the separatist party to tell me that I could not have it there.

What a reversal. Now we have the government putting into this legislation that airport authorities must display the Canadian flag at airports. It is mandatory. There is something fundamentally wrong here. If the government has to mandate the flying of the flag, it loses a lot of its value in my view. I think people should display our Canadian flag proudly. It can only have meaning if it is done voluntarily. When Canadians fly the flag voluntarily, I believe it represents the feelings in their hearts. Why should we reduce it to merely an act of obedience to a law of the land? It diminishes the act.

I noticed with some interest a couple of years ago when this was going on that there was a farmer in my riding driving up and down his field harvesting his crop. Lo and behold he had a flagpole on his combine with the Canadian flag flying as he went around his field. I felt very good about that. Here was a farmer who said he loved his country and he was not ashamed to fly the flag at the place where he worked. As I drove by and observed this I remember thinking “I want to be a farmer. He has the freedom to fly his flag at his place of work but I do not have the freedom to fly my flag at the place where I work, notwithstanding that it is the Parliament of Canada”.

In the bill there is the mandated requirement that local authorities which operate airports display the Canadian flag. I think they will anyway. That requirement should be out of there for two reasons. One, I do not think the federal government in this kind of legislation has any business whatsoever getting into the micromanagement, the day to day operations of the individual boards and their airports to that degree. My second reason for saying that this should not be there is, as I have indicated before, it diminishes the worth, the value of the act when the government says one must do it as opposed to making it truly voluntary.

Another thing that is rather interesting is the mandating of signs. It is silly to force the local authority that is running the airport to put up a sign that says “Hear ye, hear ye, all ye who pass by: We want you to know that this airport is owned by the Government of Canada”. I think it should make people feel good because they can say to themselves “We are the taxpayers who send trainloads of money to Ottawa and it is our money that has bought this airport”. There is nothing wrong with a sign like that, but again, to put that into a bill and to make it mandatory is micromanaging. It is a misplaced priority. As I have said, the other things which should be compulsory in the bill have been passed over. There the government did not see the reason to have a mandated statement.

I regret that my time has elapsed. Perhaps some members will see fit to ask me some questions and I will be very glad to defend the positions I have taken.

[Claude Duplain, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to begin discussions on implementation of the Canada Airports Act, that is Bill C-27.

We now have more than ten years experience under our belts with the operation of port authorities in Canada. The airport divestiture initiative has been an extremely successful one, and now has unanimous support. No one wants to see a return to a centralized airport administration structure.

Airport authorities have proven that they are capable of linking their management and development strategies with the needs of the communities served by the airports.

There are a number of stakeholders with a direct interest in the safe and efficient operation of these airports. These include the travelling public, the carriers, the communities the airports serve, and the federal government, in its capacity as owner of the airport land and facilities.

These stakeholders are entitled to know whether these valuable assets are being administered efficiently and safely, and are respectful of the environment. This bill attains that objective by stressing the need for an ongoing dialogue between airport administrators and stakeholders.

The bill calls for public access to the strategic planning documents established by each airport authority. These serve as an action plan for the future orientation of the airport. The bill also stresses the necessity to periodically seek public input and pass it on to airport administrators.

Current leases between airport authorities and the federal government already contain provisions encouraging accountability and transparency. With their ten years of experience, however, the stakeholders have indicated that there may be ways of improving one or the other of these.

With the Canada Airports Act, this government is responding positively to those opinions. In some cases, what is different is the nature of the details required in airport authority reports. For example, the proposed legislation now sets out the requirements for the content of a land use plan, a master plan and an environmental management plan for an airport authority. These plans are a lease requirement.

To enhance uniformity and rigour, improvements have been made to the content requirements for the strategic planning documents. There is also a statutory requirement for these plans to be updated. This will guarantee that the documents in question, and the business plans for an airport will be up to date at all times.

Airports must be developed and managed carefully, with consideration for prevailing economic conditions, the health of the airline industry, and the regional community.

Other national strategic issues that are better included in this legislation are incorporated through leases or existing legislation, such as federal identity provisions, the fact that airport authorities must be familiar with Canada's international obligations, the Minister of Transport's right to information on the performance of national airports and the delivery of services in both official languages.

In other sectors, the legislation seeks much greater accountability. This is particularly true with regard to the transparency of fares and pricing methods.

It has been said that some of these measures will result in increased costs for airport operators. Currently the entire airline industry is facing enormous financial challenges.

The leading airport authorities have already realized the advantages of being responsible and transparent non-profit organizations. These authorities are already holding ongoing and open dialogue with their main stakeholders. Consequently, many airport authorities are already meeting the legislative requirements or are taking steps to do so.

For other airport authorities, this legislation will encourage a positive response to the business sector's growing interest in accountability and increased transparency. The statutory requirements merely codify the good business and ethical practices adopted by the business sector.

The Canada Airports Act aims to provide some measure of certainty for Canadians, airport clientele and travellers. This goal can be reached through the provision of important information on airports to all stakeholders. In short, the airport authorities must manage these key public facilities responsibly and transparently.

[Roy H. Bailey, Canadian Alliance, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to enter the debate. What I have to say very much pertains to my personal experience and to my province.

Many people may get the idea that when we are talking in the House about this particular bill that the government has put forward that we are attacking the people who work for the institutions of the airlines. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I want to share a very interesting story that I experienced the first week of this month. I was trying to get out of the Maritimes, out of St. John's and my ticket indicated that I would go from St. John's to Toronto and on to Regina. I was informed that because Air Canada had not purchased sufficient supplies of de-icing equipment I was to stay where I was at.

Can anyone imagine that Canada's largest airport, and it is still April, forgetting about the fact that it would still need to de-ice, it did not have any de-icing fluid. Like a national tragedy in its attempt to save money, Canada's flag carrier stranded people all over Canada.

With the cooperation of the staff at St. John's airport I was fortunate to get on stand-by to Montreal. From Montreal I got on stand-by to Ottawa. Eventually I got back to where I stay here.

That night I got a ticket to go to Toronto and then on to Regina and guess what. Air Canada had de-icing on the Friday night. I got the ticket and went to Toronto. The first message I heard was that all passengers would have to go downstairs on flight so and so to belt 26 because there are no flights out of Toronto. Air Canada had purchased some de-icing fluid but it had used it all up.

With tremendous cooperation from the staff I had to take a taxi, go down to VIA Rail, had a chance to ride on the rail and another taxi home. That is all because of mismanagement of our flag carrier. It made a lot of people angry.

I want to say this to the staff of our airlines. I know when I get on the plane in Regina, when one has a face that only a mother could love, people remember. They always speak very kindly. It is not the airline staff that is at fault. It is the operation of the airline. It is the operation of Canada's flag carrier.

I mentioned earlier in a question that I asked one of my colleagues that within days after 9/11 the Government of Canada injected a huge amount of cash into our flag carrier. What did it do? It brought in low cost airlines to compete with WestJet which was already giving western Canada good service. They are still staggering about that over there.

As I have said before, my constituency represents the largest number of ports of entry into the U.S. of any constituency in Canada. We have had in the past only one airport of entry status, just one for the whole province of Saskatchewan. The government has chosen to close it down.

I can understand that in the early days after the towers coming down. However with the chamber of commerce in Estevan and with the local people we have tried and tried to get that recognized again because people use it. Companies use it. Companies that are now mining diamonds east of Prince Albert will land there as a point of entry and will go on directly to the plant.

The reason we have been given is a wishy-washy cost factor idea that makes no sense, none. A private plane or mining plane with geologists, map makers or whatever coming into Prince Albert from the United States has to go all the way to Winnipeg and then fly all the way back. Can anyone believe that?

In comparison, most MPs, a high percentage, are home within two hours of flying time. There should be no complaints. It takes much longer for those who live in the remote areas and we understand that. If the demographics put an MP in a remote area of Canada, hospital and health services and plane fares are not going to be as good as in the larger population centres. That is understood, but the government seems not to understand it. It forgets it.

As my colleague mentioned, we had a port of entry at Lethbridge which was closed. We sweep all across the 49th parallel and keep on going until we hit Highway 75, I think it is, and there is not one service entry for private aircraft to come in which would be a legal entry. It is a national disgrace that for virtually three big provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba we have but one airport of entry status.

This is hurting. It is hurting me, not personally, but it is hurting my area. People who for a generation have used it because of its airport of entry status can no longer do it. The lodges that fly in the hunters, fishers and so on with their own planes are out.

Is the government so determined to only serve the populated areas that it will stand in the House and tell the three prairie provinces we can have one airport of entry status despite the cries from across Canada? I hope something can be done about that.

I want to thank the people of Estevan in particular, the chamber of commerce and the work that they have done to try to get this business back, not just for the community but indeed for the sake of the province which I am proud to call home.

We are not complaining about having only the two major airports at Saskatoon and Regina. Most people outside those two cities will probably have an average flying time of two to three hours to get to those airports. We never hear complaints about that.

What we are asking for is recognition that in fact we do exist and we need these entry points. Once we get to Regina or Saskatoon we are not complaining about the service. We are complaining about the lousy taxes that have been put on that nobody can justify.

I will go back to Bill C-27. It is high on material and everything, but it is low on accountability. When we read it, we have to use a magnifying glass to see the amount of accountability. My area was left out and I am disappointed.

[Rick Casson, Canadian Alliance, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is good to be able to rise today to put some comments toward the debate on Bill C-27. The problem with the bill is that it does not address the issues that face many airports in Canada. It addresses a select few airports across the country. There are many more airports that have serious issues. I want to get into some of those issues that affect the airport in my riding in Lethbridge and ask why those issues were not addressed in the legislation.

One of the things that we have constantly brought up about the airline industry in this country is the fact that if the airport fees were reduced, the security tax on flights eliminated and the fuel excise tax forgiven it would help all airlines. This would help the operation of all our airports. Consequently, we would see more people flying.

Essentially what we must do is encourage more involvement in air travel. If the government taxes everything that moves, everything that uses fuel and every passenger, it does not create that atmosphere that we need to encourage more air traffic.

I would like to say that I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Souris—Moose Mountain.

One of the issues that is not addressed and needs to be addressed regarding the airports across the country is CARs 308. That is going to create a problem for many smaller airports. I know that when the airport authority in Lethbridge took over the airport from the federal government the issue of having emergency responders on site was forgiven and the ability to service that emergency situation from existing fire departments was fine at that time. If that burden is now put back on the local airport, it will be a burden that I think will almost take the airport down. We cannot have that. That is not addressed in the bill and it needs to be.

Recently a group from Lethbridge came to Ottawa to deal with an issue facing our airport and almost two dozen airports across the country, I believe, which after September 11 lost their airport of entry status. This allows international flights to come in from across the line, mostly, and land at these sites and be greeted by a customs officer and have people to go through customs. Taking that away has been an absolutely devastating issue for the airport in my riding. I have talked with other airports affected across Canada and it is an issue for them also.

I have been told by other airport authorities across Canada that they are having trouble getting this issue resolved. So I have to hand it to the committee from my riding, the chamber of commerce, the airport authority, the business community, the mayor and council of Lethbridge and all the surrounding communities and municipalities that got together and supported this group that came to Ottawa to lobby the ministers across the way to get this airport of entry status reinstated. To date it has not happened. I believe the committee requested that some time be given to the ministers for them to come up with something. As of today I am not aware that anything has happened.

There are many issues that need to be and should be addressed and affect many airports across the country. These issues affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and have been completely left out of the legislation. We need legislation that would do this and it has not been forthcoming.

In order to round out what this means to southern Alberta, I would like to read excerpts from the executive summary of the document that was brought to Ottawa by the committee from my riding of Lethbridge. Some of the issues that were stated are as follows:

Southern Alberta is a vibrant, productive, economic region with a trading population of over 275,000 people. At the core of this region is the City of Lethbridge, the third largest city in Alberta with a population of 73,000 residents. It is the closest metropolitan area to the United States border, located 120 kilometres away.

The bottom 100 miles of the southern boundary of my riding is the 49th parallel. The summary continues:

This region is most famous for agriculture and livestock production using leading edge technology in crop and animal science as well as irrigation. Lethbridge is home to two federally operated Agriculture Research Centres which employ nearly 800 employees (85 PhD-level scientists) and is just completing a 26 million dollar retrofit and expansion to ensure that Canada remains on the mandate of promoting innovation, maintaining the security of the food system, and protecting the health of the environment.

The region is also growing quickly in agri-food processing and manufacturing with companies such as Pratt & Whitney, McCain's and Lamb Weston investing heavily in the region. The City of Lethbridge is home to two publicly funded post-secondary institutions. The University of Lethbridge and the Lethbridge Community College, with a combined student population of 13,000.

Lethbridge is also blessed with a full-service airport owned and operated by the County of Lethbridge and located in the centre of the region and five minutes from downtown Lethbridge. Thanks to the leadership of the Federal Government--

--it is giving some bouquets here that I might not have done--

--the Lethbridge County Airport has recently completed a 3.3 million dollars infrastructure upgrade to ensure the efficiency and safety of flight operations. This investment by the federal government demonstrates a vital interest in the region and its economically viability.

With that investment and that agreement in place, the federal government then came in and took away the airport of entry status.

The coalition of individuals, organizations, institutions, businesses and local governments of Southern Alberta are distressed by the recent decision by the federal government to remove the Airport of Entry (AOE) status. The loss of AOE status in 2001 was the second reduction in customs service over a five-year period. The original customs office based in Lethbridge was removed in 1996, at which time the region was assured that customs service would continue at the Lethbridge Country Airport.

The decision to remove AOE and customs service has had a detrimental effect on the region. Many regional, national and international corporations have felt an immediate, negative financial impact as a consequence of this decision. These businesses have depended on customs service for the timely and efficient transportation of goods and key personnel. Now these businesses are losing sales, losing opportunities, experiencing increased costs and are seeing a decrease in their ability to compete.

That pretty much sums up that particular issue that is of grave concern to the entire community of southern Alberta. With 275,000 people that are served by that airport and international businesses that have located in the area, it is absolutely critical to the economic growth of that region that that status be reinstated. I have raised the issue in the House a couple of times with the minister to no avail. A strong delegation that came here was promised something and as of yet we have not heard anything.

Hopefully, somewhere in the near future this will be addressed and the airport of entry status will be reinstated. This will allow the businesses and the economy of southern Alberta to continue to grow and prosper because of the ability of international flights to land there.

The entire issue of tax, tax, tax; the fuel tax that airlines have to pay, the security tax that travellers have to pay, and the airport fees that airport authorities have to pay, when all of these are added up they become quite a detriment to the operation and viability of a region.

There is one more point I would like to make. To me it is absolutely ridiculous that the airport operators face increased rents when they improve the airports. A case in point is the Winnipeg airport authority. When it took over the operation of the Winnipeg international airport, its first year's rent was $900,000. After the Winnipeg airport authority improved the airport, the government decided it should pay $7 million in rent by the year 2007.

The local people are improving their airport. They are putting money into it, creating business and creating an atmosphere where business can thrive. Then the federal government increases the rent on that facility from $900,000 to $7 million when it had nothing to do with improving it. That does not make a lot of sense. It is absolutely detrimental to development. It puts a strain on travellers. As was mentioned earlier by my colleague, whether the airport user fees are $5, $10 or $15, we bump into them as we travel across the country. The airport authorities are having to charge those fees to help pay a bill like the $7 million assessment from the federal government.

There is a lot that is wrong with the bill. There is a lot that it does not address. Hopefully after this debate and after more questions in the House, the government will get the idea and put into this legislation the things that Canadians need.

[Ken Epp, Canadian Alliance, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleague for a well delivered speech. He expressed the same frustration that we all hear over and over from Canadians in all walks of life.

Really, the Liberal government is an oxymoron. Liberal means freedom. It comes from the same root word as liberate. Yet we have a Liberal government that has its tentacles of control on every aspect of our lives. Here it is, micromanaging airports in Bill C-27, right down to the little nitty-gritty of flying flags and putting up signs. It is ridiculous to have that kind of thing in legislation.

This government is really a control freak and a tax collection freak. That is all it wants to do. All the Liberal members in the House should be howling in protest at my statement if they do not agree with what I have said. They are really the worst kind of control freak tax grabbers and we need to stop them.

My hon. colleague has expressed very well some of the objections to Bill C-27. I would like him to perhaps enlarge briefly on the subject of the Liberal government's ingratiating control of everybody's lives and every little detail of our lives.

[Randy White, Canadian Alliance, Langley—Abbotsford, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-27, the Canada airports act.

We have an airport in my riding, in the City of Abbotsford, which serves all the folks in Langley, Aldergrove and throughout Abbotsford. In fact the whole Fraser Valley and parts of Vancouver are well served by the Abbotsford airport.

The main airline out of there, which is very near and dear to our hearts, is WestJet, an airline that we in our community are extremely proud of and which is fully supported by the folks back home. Another very large airline in Canada tried to weasel its way into WestJet's clientele but it did not do so well. Therefore, I am glad to say that the people in our community very much support WestJet and its activities.

Along with WestJet's efficient operations come these things called airport fee, taxes, security taxes and so on, levied in large part by the federal government.

I will go through what the bill reflects as to the kind of autonomy airports would have but also what kind of effect the federal government has on those kind of taxes.

To fly between Calgary and Edmonton with WestJet costs $100. Added on to WestJet's fees is a GST bill of $11.23 and a security fee of $22.43, which was imposed by the government just recently. Then we have an insurance fee of $6, an airport improvement fee in Edmonton of $15, an airport improvement fee in Calgary of $12, and a Nav Canada charge of $5. Therefore the round trip fare the consumer pays is $171.66 for a $100 flight.

One of the problems with flights today is that the government cannot get out of the pockets of the consumer. If there is a problem with security, the first thing the government does is ding consumers to pay the bills, when in fact, if it looked around hard enough, it would find all kinds of dollars in its own coffers to fund such programs as security, improvement fees and so on. The mentality of the governments, be they federal, provincial or municipal, is to ding the taxpayer. I think most people are darn sick of it.

If we are talking about airports, by and large people, if they want to go from one point to another, must use an airport and an airline. The problem is the governments are sensing that and they are dinging everybody that has any association with an airport or an airline today.

Notwithstanding that, WestJet happens to be one of the most profitable North American airlines and will continue to be so because of a good common sense approach to things. We could all take an example from WestJet, in my community at least, and look at how to operate an airline and then, coincidentally, how to operate an airport that could help the airlines.

I will be opposing this bill for a number of reasons. One of them is this government interference in a pretty good idea. In fact we fought for the privatization of airports and airport authorities for a long time in the House of Commons. That idea finally went through the thick heads across the way. Now we find ourselves facing Bill C-27, which is essentially an interference bill on what the government created.

Essentially, clause 12 of the bill gives the minister the power to make directions that are final and not subject to appeal or review. That in this place and country is a dangerous approach. If we give ministers final approval on anything, it more or less gives final approval to help their friends, relatives or whomever, anybody but the consumer.

The airport in our community of Abbotsford is a municipally run airport. It is a fine airport. We do not even have parking fees, so we keep the costs down as much as we can. The real problem is the interference in increased fees from federal government hurt us.

Let me give an example. The first year's rent for the Winnipeg International Airport, after it was handed over to the Winnipeg Airports Authority in 1997, was $900,000. After the Winnipeg Airports Authority improved the airport, Ottawa wanted it to pay $7 million in rent in the year 2007. There we go again. The government turns it over and gets its fee. The local airport authority operates it right, then Ottawa says “Gimme, gimme, gimme”. It is so typical. Then the consumer fees have to be increased sevenfold to pay for that.

Let us just go through a couple of other issues in this bill. If a passenger fee is imposed to finance a major capital program, infrastructure covered by an agreement referred to in paragraph 8 of clause 124, for instance, gives the following criteria:

--the annual financial statements must disclose, on an annual and cumulative basis from the year in which the fee is established, all expenditures made in respect of the program or infrastructure and all revenues from the passenger fee and any other fee orsource of revenue or funding received by the airport authority for the program or infrastructure.

What this essentially says is that if an airport has a capital program and it gets revenues from fees to fund that capital program, it has to go through a whole litany of reporting procedures for the federal government. I find it ironic that when a private authority raises money through revenues and undertakes a capital project, it has to go through so much reporting, yet the government blows away billions of dollars a year with virtually no reporting. When private industry or any private organization gets revenues, runs decent projects, makes efficiencies, it reports all to the government and that way it gets its fees. However, when the government takes fees and spends it on projects, it blows it away with no accountability. Does that tell us something about the government? Does it tell us something about a philosophy that is absolutely wrong?

The bottom line is that when private industry and private organizations work and when they raise their own funds for efficiencies, the government ought to stay as far away from it as possible. Our experience with government, at least since the Liberal government has been in, is that it can blow money one heck of a lot faster and irresponsibly with no accountability than an airport authority can.

I must say this about any government intervention in these organizations. One reason why we wanted airport authorities in the first place was to get out of government-run airports because it did not run them right. Now that we have implemented that process, government wants to get back in because it sees what is going on. It sees that these airports are running right.

There is one other thing that I must say I have observed going across the country. This whole issue of airport improvement fees, I believe, started in Vancouver where they charged $10.

Ironically enough, when coming through the Vancouver airport the other day, I was in a lineup with 300 people to pay a $10 improvement fee. I would like to advise Vancouver airport that if it is raising $10 per person from people going through it, the least it could do is have enough people available to collect the money so we are not standing in line. Does that not make sense?

Not only in one airport do I have to stand in a line of 200 or 300 people to pay the fee, but a few months back I went to another airport in this country and it also was collecting a $10 fee. This airport has maybe two or three planes a day going through it, but it has the same $10 airport fee that Vancouver has, and it has no improvements. In fact, I doubt whether it needs any improvements or has even had any improvements in the last 10 or 15 years.

This is not an improvement fee. This is a tax.

Whilst I say that government should have got out of all of this, I would like to tell these airports that if they need improvements they should try to fund them out of the dollars that they currently get. If they cannot and must charge a fee, they should raise the money they want and then do away with the fee. The fee should not be charged if the airport has not been or is not going to be improved. Otherwise these guys will be back in there wanting a cut of the fees and wanting to increase the fees. Eventually, if they cannot get their cut and the airport is profitable, these guys will take away the airports.

The bottom line is this. One airline in this country, WestJet, has proven to be efficient and has proven to be a good means of transportation. It is community friendly. Clientele are dedicated to it because of its attitude. WestJet does not need government fees, taxes, licences and on and on to ruin it for the travelling public.

Those are my comments on Bill C-27. I wish we could get one bill in any one instance where the government does not stick its damn feet in where they do not belong, but that is not to be. I have been around here for 10 years and every time I get up to speak to a bill I am always asking why the government has interfered or once it has interfered why it cannot do it right. That goes right from justice to health care and so on.

[Bill Casey, Progressive Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Mr. Speaker, as I watched the divestiture process unfold, I was amazed at how little order and consistency there was to the process. One airport would make a deal that was satisfactory to it, then the next airport would make a completely different deal, a different deal on the rent or a different deal on the transitional fund that was given at the time the airport was transferred. There was no order to this. The government decided to get rid of the airports. It had a target and a date and it went through the system and did whatever it took to get rid of them.

To answer the hon. member's question more directly, I have some quotes. I talked to an official at an airport just a few minutes ago to get a little background on how the airport authorities actually felt about Bill C-27. These are the quotes. “It is an attempt to interfere with a system that is now working”. “Airports are responding to regional needs and no one is better able to do that than us, the authority”. “Now the government is trying to reclaim the power and control, but they will not participate in the cost to do that”.

It pretty much answers the question of the government's position. This is not a compromise, it is not a give and take deal, it is all take. The government wants to take back the power and control. It wants to be able to make specific orders to these airport authorities but it does not want to give any more assistance. It does not want to bring down the security tax to the actual cost. It does not want to bring down the rental to an appropriate fee. It does not want to acknowledge that the Department of Transport is now a huge profit centre for the government. Before it provided airports all the costs through the Department of Transport. It does not do any of that now. Quite incredibly, instead of providing money, now it takes money in rents but it is not prepared to share that with authorities and it is very difficult for most small airports to make ends meet.

I predict that we will see some problems with our medium to small airports. We will see some other inconsistent and, if I can call it that, screwball approaches to helping some airports survive. Rather than have an appropriate plan for them and make the changes that have to be made across the board, we will see inconsistent capital grants, funds here or injections there.

[Bill Casey, Progressive Conservative, Cumberland—Colchester, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to talk about this airport issue. As a former transport critic I was involved with the divestiture process at one time. Now it seems to be snapping back to haunt us a little and it is a pleasure for me to talk about it.

I want to give an Atlantic perspective to this if I can. I was reading in Hansard the remarks made last night by the hon. member for Saint John. She was complaining about the service from Saint John, New Brunswick. The minister apparently said that she should go to Moncton and then fly from Moncton because there are better connections there. I used to fly to Moncton, but now I drive to Halifax because Moncton does not have direct flights to Ottawa either. The service has definitely declined after the divestiture and after all the changes that the government has made to transportation in the aircraft industry. Certainly, that was not very effective advice for the member for Saint John by the minister.

Let us look at the Maritimes. In St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, we had airport workers on strike for seven weeks. It created chaos there. We have added to the burden of the strike with all the other security issues and security fees, and the SARS issue which has created more difficulty for this airport. It costs more money. It costs delays in time because of the strikes and the chaos.

The member for New Brunswick Southwest was standing a few minutes ago talking about his discussion with the CEO of the Saint John airport, John Buchanan, who said that the airport was only one crisis away from a disaster. Since the hon. member had that discussion with the CEO of the Saint John airport, we have experienced the gulf war and SARS.

Right now many airports are having a difficult time making ends meet because they do not have the revenue that they need to have to pay their bills and allow for capital expenditures in the future. Meanwhile, the government is bleeding them dry with high rentals. They all say that if the government wants to help, Bill C-27 should just say it will reduce the rental fees on the airport facilities to the communities that use them.

We must understand that the airport authorities get their money from two basic sources. They get it from the airplanes that come in and pay landing and tarmac fees, but they also get it from rentals for rent-a-cars, restaurants, Tim Hortons coffee shops and things like that. Therefore, there are two sources of revenue: one is directly airplane related and the other is non-airplane related, parking lots and so forth. However, as the traffic declines these airports cannot sustain these small businesses within their airports so they lose that rent. It just exacerbates and gets worse, especially for the small airports with a limited amount revenue.

Bill C-27, in their view, would impose tremendous restrictions on them in their ability to generate revenue. The government is denying them the revenue by changes in its policies which have reduced the numbers of flights and the types of airplanes and the fees that can be charged there. It is making it more difficult for airports to generate the alternative income.

In a recent discussion with some other airport officials in airports like Halifax, which is the biggest airport in Atlantic Canada, the members of these airport authorities all said that these changes were unnecessary. As one of them said, it is an attempt to interfere with the system. It is an attempt to regain power that the government used to have over the airport system while at the same time not wanting to share the burden. The government wants to recapture its power but does not want to share the burden and the cost. The bill is a way for the government to regain power, revenue and control but not share the responsibility.

Every airport administrator I talk to tells me that the outrageous rental fees are the biggest problem right now. This is the problem that is keeping the airports from surviving, prospering, and being able to provide a service at a level that used to be there before divestiture. The other thing is the security tax. As one of them said, “No one minds paying the security tax as long as the money goes for security”.

However, as far as the airport authorities can tell, the actual cost of security tax is triple what is needed to provide the security that is being provided now. What the government is trying to do is gouge the public and it is using the excuse of September 11 to impose a tax on security which is triple the amount required so that it can just raise more revenue.

It is somewhat the same or at least there is a parallel with employment insurance, where the premiums are so high. The government is raising hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of the employees who pay employment insurance when in fact the money is never going to go to employment insurance benefits. This security tax is never ever going to go to provide security at the present level. The people who I talk to in the business say that the tax is three times what is necessary.

We would like the government to go back and review this whole issue again, have the committee discuss it and listen to the airport authorities because they are the ones on the front lines. They know the difficulties in providing the service that they used to provide.

The Government of Canada used to pay to provide airports to the communities. Now it charges exorbitant rents so that the Government of Canada is getting hundreds of millions of dollars in rent every year when it used to pay out to provide these airports. It is now time for the Government of Canada to come back and participate in the cost of running the airports, but not try to interfere and micro-manage what the airport authorities are doing.

They are doing a good job. They are providing the services that are appropriate for the communities in which they serve. Nobody is better able to do that. No one is more qualified to provide those services and know what services are needed than the airport authorities because they represent the communities they are in. Let us let them do their job. Let us get off their back.

Let us reduce the security tax to what it should be and to what the actual cost is. Let us reduce the rents to a point where the airports can survive. Those airports that do not have very much traffic cannot support the alternative sources of revenue, the parking lots, the stores, the tax free stores an so on. They do not have access to that revenue so they should be given a special category and given a special deal on rents.

Those are our thoughts as we follow this and as we see it move forward. We will be watching it closely, but essentially the government should not try to interfere with these authorities. It should give them the freedom to operate, get off their backs, and stop overtaxing on rent and overtaxing on security.

[Jay Hill, Canadian Alliance, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to first congratulate my hon. colleague from Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys for her excellent speech on Bill C-27.

I want to quote from another letter. I quoted from two letters during my brief remarks. I want to read a brief analysis of Bill C-27 that was sent to me by Mr. Alvin Maier, managing director, North Peace Airport Services, in his representation for the Regional Community Airports Coalition of Canada. It encompasses a number of small and medium size airports. In his conclusion he stated:

Most of the language contained in C-27 already exists in most of the leases that NAS airports have with Transport Canada. If Transport Canada has issue with any of these airports in particular, then perhaps they should review the leases with these airports, and not attempt to introduce legislation that attempts to regulate all airports universally, and will negatively affect the viability of the regional community airports and the economic development of the communities they serve system of Canada.

I want to refer my colleague from Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys to this particular conclusion drawn by Mr. Alvin Maier from Fort St. John in my riding because she remarked quite eloquently about how this legislation, if indeed it were to pass in its present form, would negatively impact on Kamloops in her riding. I know she represents a riding very similar to mine where the airports have the same concerns. I think it gets to the thrust of her presentation where she referred to this one size fits all approach that the government is taking and the negative impact it will have, especially on the smaller airports.

[Jay Hill, Canadian Alliance, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise in the debate on Bill C-27, the Canada airports act, brought forward by the Minister of Transport and the Liberal government.

At the outset of my remarks I want to congratulate, as some of my other colleagues have done, the great work of my colleague the member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam as our transport critic. He has done an admiral job in dissecting the inadequacies of Bill C-27, as he has done with many pieces of legislation the government has brought forward in the transport sector specifically. He is certainly a great asset to our party, the Canadian Alliance, and is a great representative of his riding in Vancouver.

I will begin my remarks by reading into the record a letter I recently received from the Prince George Airport Authority. It is one of the airport authorities that will be impacted directly by Bill C-27, the new Canada airports act.

I was encouraged to note that members such as the Liberal member for Hamilton West during his remarks of about an hour ago raised considerable concerns with Bill C-27. I hope that is indicative of the open-mindedness of a lot of Liberal members of Parliament and hopefully the members who sit on the Standing Committee for Transport.

When the bill actually goes before the transport committee, I hope we will see some substantive amendments to address the concerns that we hear in this chamber echoed not just in western Canada by Canadian Alliance MPs but indeed by Liberal MPs representing many of the ridings in Ontario and also by the Conservative members. Indeed the Progressive Conservative member from New Brunswick who just spoke during questions and comments raised concerns about airports there as well.

Clearly we can see that concern about the legislation is not something confined just to western Canada. It is something that goes coast to coast to coast in Canada.

As well as congratulating my colleague from Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, I want to indicate that I will be splitting my time in the debate with my hon. colleague the member for Kamloops, Thompson and Highland Valleys.

I want to read into the record a letter that I received from the Prince George Airport Authority which directly concerns Bill C-27. It was written on April 10, so it is obviously hot off the presses as it were:

The impact of air transportation on Canada's economy and our quality of life is significant. When the viability of the air transportation system is threatened--as it is today--the consequences for Canada are enormous.

Air Canada's filing under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) demonstrates the depth of the crisis facing the air transport industry and those that depend on it. Much more is at stake, however, than the future of a single company.

Air Canada's restructuring combined with the impact of SARS and the war in Iraq has created an environment where many airports--both small and large--are at risk. These difficulties have combined to generate a 20% reduction in traffic. If reduced traffic numbers continue, most airport authorities will reluctantly have little option but to increase fees charged to tenants, including airlines. The impact on smaller airport communities where Air Canada is the primary or sole carrier will be the most severe.

Airport managements have consistently reduced controllable costs and eliminated non-value added tasks. There is little residual fat. Even so reduced passenger volumes combined with an imminent and significant reduction in Air Canada frequencies mean that airports must seek to further lower costs to minimize consequential increases in fees and charges to airlines and airport users. Without federal government action to remove the significant costs it creates for this mode of transportation--costs many times higher than any other mode--there will be unfortunate consequences.

In the current environment it is also essential that the federal government does not increase the burden on the industry by introducing legislative or regulatory burdens that will compound the problems for little or no return. Before the Canada Airports Act or further regulation is introduced, a comprehensive regulatory impact and cost-benefit analysis must be completed. Any proposed legislative or regulatory changes have to be viewed in the broader context of the viability of the aviation industry.

We call on the federal government to stop treating air transportation as significant contributors to general revenues and take immediate and effective action to stabilize the industry by:

a) Implementing an immediate moratorium on federal airport rents--which constitute the largest uncontrollable cost for most major airports--while the current rent review is finalized;

b) Recognize that unlike other travellers, air travellers are required to pay for security. To reduce intermodal discrepancies the federal government must:

i. Suspend the air travellers security tax;

ii. Fully fund the cost of additional policing and security imposed by federal regulation;

c) Fully fund the ACAP program and make these capital funds available to airports with one million passengers or less [in other words, smaller airports];

d) Create a stabilization fund for smaller airports to mitigate the short term impacts of service dislocation; and

e) Reduce regulatory burden.

The purpose of these actions when combined should be to provide security and reassurance to our passengers, tenants, lenders and communities that the long term future of air transportation in Canada is assured.

We stand ready to work with the federal government and parliamentarians to find solutions for these unprecedented difficulties.

That letter was addressed to me from the Prince George Airport Authority Inc. and was signed by Jim Blake, the chair of the airport operating board for that airport.

I also have a letter from TradePort International Corporation. That is the organization that is in partnership to operate the Hamilton airport. I will read a couple of segments from that letter which was sent to me by Tony F. Battaglia, president and CEO of TradePort International Corporation. Mr. Battaglia wrote:

The airline industry is in crisis. The impacts of 9/11 and the war on terrorism; the current war in Iraq; and a developing epidemic known as SARS have led to a 20% reduction in air traffic. Air Canada's restructuring will have a dramatic impact on smaller airport communities across the country where Air Canada is the dominant or sole air carrier. Airports must adjust to the new realities of air travel. Reduced frequencies and withdrawals of service mean that airports will have to reduce costs in order to minimize impacts on airlines and air travellers.

Mr. Battaglia went on to state:

Blindly advancing this gratuitous legislation may bring irreparable harm to Canada's smaller airports [such as Hamilton]; there are other alternatives. We suggest the following:

Phased implementation of the act with Canada's schedule II airports exempt from its provisions until three years after its proclamation.

Schedule II airports would have three years to file with the Minister of Transportation an operating model that satisfies the act's governing principles of transparency and accountability.

As operators of the John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport, we stand willing to work with the federal government and parliamentarians to find solutions that meet the needs of the government, the aviation industry, and air travellers.

Unfortunately, I have just had time in my short remarks today to cite two examples. One is the Prince George airport authority in my riding of Prince George--Peace River where that airport has some serious concerns with Bill C-27. The other is across the country some 3,000 miles away in Hamilton. Some of the same concerns are being echoed by the airport operating authority in Hamilton.

I would have liked to have had more time to go on at some length. As my colleague from Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam said in his remarks, one of the biggest things of concern to me as a member of Parliament for a large rural riding that has a number of airports, and specifically, Fort St. John and Dawson Creek that are impacted by things like CARs 308, is that this civil air regulation that is being brought forward by the Minister of Transport is going to do irreparable damage to the small and medium size airports in western Canada in particular.

We are raising that issue because that is not contained in Bill C-27, as my colleague has said. As our transport critic he has raised the issue repeatedly. I have raised it. Other colleagues have raised the issue of CARs 308. The imposition of firefighting and crash rescue will do irreparable damage if and when those airports have to pick up all the costs.

Since it is the federal government that will be re-imposing those regulations on the small airports, we are in favour of the the federal government paying the costs.

[James Moore, Canadian Alliance, Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question from my colleague from New Brunswick. Being from New Brunswick these are trying times.

An interesting thing happened at Miramichi airport in New Brunswick. When the former Liberal finance minister imposed the $24 air tax, the Liberals had a list of approximately 80 airports to which it would apply. Being members of the Canadian Alliance, we believe in smaller taxes, less government and more freedom. We enumerated all 80 airports and offered 80 amendments taking each and every single airport off the list. This forced Liberal members on the committee to vote in favour of taxing each individual airport.

We suggested to the Liberals that Miramichi airport be taken off the list of airports required to impose the $24 air tax. The Liberals said they thought it should be left on the list. We mentioned that it was actually a dead airport, that there was no jet service into it. Hearing this they agreed to take it off the list. However they amended our amendment and put in a caveat stating that if Miramichi airport did resume daily jet service they reserved the right to reimpose the $24 air tax.

The policy of the Liberals is only if an airport is actually dead will they remove the air tax. Only if the government actually kills an airport in terms of its ability to provide competitive service will it take its foot off its throat in terms of its tax increases.

CARs 308 is another tax, the five minute response time. It is an unfunded mandate by the Liberal government on air carriers.

There are examples are all over the place. The Liberals are absolutely blind in terms of the cost to airports. They have shown through Bill C-27 that they have learned nothing from their constantly failing record on the air industry.

[Greg Thompson, Progressive Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Mr. Speaker, a couple of months ago I met with Mr. John Buchanan, the chief executive officer of the Saint John airport. He suggested that we should take a careful look at Bill C-27. He has some pretty strong concerns about the bill and its impact on small airports to comply with the legislation. He suggested that the Saint John airport is only one crisis away from a critical stage. It is not only at the Saint John airport but at Moncton and Fredericton, New Brunswick as well.

I am quite familiar with the Saint John airport and the Fredericton airport, which are of equal distance from my home. I have a choice as to which one I use when I travel. Bill C-27 will place a huge imposition on those airports and their ability to meet the bottom line.

I would like the member's response to that. He has taken the minister to task on some of the provisions and fees that have been imposed arbitrarily on the airports by the Government of Canada. Could the member reference some of that and the future of some of the airports?

[James Moore, Canadian Alliance, Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to comment briefly on the previous speech. Unregulated monopolies that are imposing airport improvement fees without the consultation of air carriers or the communities are not a good idea, or an idea that needs to be exported anywhere. In fact, unregulated monopolies are generally not a good idea.

I rise to participate in the debate on Bill C-27, an act respecting airport authorities and other airport operators and amending other acts, otherwise known as the Canada airports act. In just the past couple of weeks I can think of various transport related priorities and priority actions that this Parliament has called on the Liberal government to implement. In fact, one only need go back to the last day of the House sitting just before the Easter break, on April 11, when the Standing Committee on Transport tabled our unanimous report, “An Industry in Crisis: Safeguarding the Viability of the Canadian Airline Industry”.

Our standing committee heard witnesses, read reports and then made four specific recommendations to the House and to the Liberal government. Three of them could be implemented immediately without any need to impose new legislation. It could be done in regulations with the stroke of a pen by the Liberal cabinet. Recommendation 2 was that, and I quote:

The federal government eliminate the Air Travellers Security Charge.

Recommendation 3 stated:

The federal government suspend rental payments by airports for a two-year period and the airports shall pass the rental savings on to air carriers.

Recommendation 4 stated:

The federal government, for a two-year period, reduce by 50% the federal aviation fuel excise tax rate.

There are three things that need to be said about these recommendations. First, they were unanimous. They were supported by all five political parties in the House. Second, they are clear and they are unambiguous. There is no doubt whatsoever as to their meaning, their intent and their consequence. Third, they can be implemented today without passing any new legislation.

These changes are what virtually every industry stakeholder, from Air Canada to its competitors and from the travel industry to various unions have been demanding from the government for well over a year. The government's complete unwillingness to take concrete action to solve the problems affecting the airline industry is both baffling and astounding. It is also, given the number of jobs involved in both the airline and tourism sectors, somewhat tragic.

We have all heard the expression, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic ”. It is meant to apply to a situation where those in control do nothing substantial to remedy the situation but then take some superficial action so that it cannot be charged against them that they did not take any kind of action at all.

The airline industry is in trouble and the House Standing Committee on Transport sought and received the industry's advice as to what constructive steps this Liberal government might take. The committee then unanimously adopted recommendations and forwarded them to the government. However, the Liberal Minister of Transport does not want to do anything substantial to help the airline industry and he does not want to be seen to be doing nothing, so he has introduced the bill that we are debating today, Bill C-27, the Canada airports act. Truly, he is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic .

Even if we were to consider only the government's policy with respect to airports, the Canada airports act fails to address some of the more important issues facing airports. As a member of Parliament, the single most common airport related concern that I receive is related to an issue known as CARs 308, a recently imposed five minute emergency response time at smaller airports that has dramatically increased the operating costs for smaller airports. The federal government has not offered a dime in operating assistance. This unfunded federal government mandate is a requirement and it is the biggest single issue facing many small airports. It is completely absent in this bill we are debating today. It is the number one concern. It is what we hear most about and it is not in this bill.

The second biggest issue that many of us face is trying to meet new and heightened security standards while understanding that small airports are often the weakest link in the security system. Other countries such as Germany, England and France, with more experience in dealing with terrorists at airports, require arriving passengers from certain destinations to go through security screening upon arrival before proceeding to connecting flights. Essentially, these passengers arrive in a non-secure part of the larger airport and must proceed through security screening in order to get into the secure portions of the airport.

Such a system in Canada would allow for passengers departing smaller centres on small aircraft to go through security only if they were connecting to a major centre. The Europeans use this system because it costs less and offers the type of security they have needed in the past to fight organizations like the IRA, the ETA and the Baader-Meinhof group. Nowhere is this idea found in Bill C-27, the Canada airports act.

I know that the Canada airports act deals only with larger airports. Nonetheless, if the average member of Parliament is getting mail on small airports and the Liberal government introduces a bill dealing with big airports, there are some who would say that the government is really not listening to Canadians. We certainly have a transport minister who does not listen to the transportation sector.

We have a Liberal administration that has ignored the Standing Committee on Transport's unanimous recommendations on how to help the airline industry. We have a Minister of Transport who has chosen to ignore Canada's single biggest airport related issue when telling his department what issues he wants them to address. He has ignored CARs 308.

Then, and this is the best part, we have a Minister of Transport who has introduced a Canada airports act that is at best totally unnecessary and at worst a huge step backward.

When we talk to the airline industry, the airport operators and the flying public, we find a general acceptance of the way that airports are being run. Of course there are a few problems, but no one has yet contacted my office and said that there is something wrong with the airports which must be addressed rapidly and we need a new law to deal with them and we have to get this done. We just do not hear that from Canadians, yet that is precisely what we have here in this legislation.

Every law that a government tables presumably is aimed at solving a particular problem. Thus, every act has a summary of the ways in which it would improve the status quo or remedy a particular wrong. In analyzing the Canada airports act, it is instructive to look for the motivation. The national airports policy laid out in section 7 of the Canada airports act calls for a “national network of airports in Canada” that are operated in a consistent manner. Essentially, Bill C-27 believes that all airports in our “national network” should be run in a similar way.

The logical problem with this approach becomes readily apparent when one realizes that the scheme would apply equally to both Gander airport, which handled 86,000 passengers in 2000, and Toronto's Pearson airport, which served 28 million passengers. For every person who goes through Gander, 325 will go through Toronto. In fact, with 17,000 people working at Toronto international airport, Toronto has about one-fifth as many staff as Gander has annual passengers. Yet under Bill C-27, both would face similar obligations and regulations.

To the extent that Bill C-27 is aimed at providing a one size fits all solution for a huge range of airports, this is not only a bad idea but also a solution for a problem that simply does not exist. In fact, the bill provides for two very different regimes. One regime, described in parts 2, 3 and 4 of Bill C-27, applies only to the following 18 former Transport Canada operated airports: Charlottetown, Fredericton, Gander, Halifax, London, Moncton, Montreal, Ottawa, Prince George, Quebec, Regina, Saskatoon, St. John's, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Victoria. Another regime applies to all Canadian airports that have had an average of 200,000 emplaned and deplaned passengers over the last three years. Right away we realize that Gander does not reach the 200,000 threshold, so we might think that the Canada airports act would not apply to Gander. But because Gander was a major international airport a few years ago, it is not only covered by the act but by the same standards that are currently applied and would be applied under Bill C-27 to Toronto's Pearson airport and Vancouver.

We see similar problems when we compare Thunder Bay and Hamilton, both of which served roughly 550,000 passengers in the year 2001. Bill C-27 would hold Thunder Bay, a former Transport Canada facility, to a higher standard than Hamilton, WestJet's eastern hub. Thus, 84 of Bill C-27's 215 sections do not apply to Abbotsford, Kelowna or Hamilton, all of which have non-stop service to cities at other ends of the country, but they do apply to smaller airports simply because these airports were formerly owned by Transport Canada.

Prior to the introduction of Bill C-27, Canadians were not overly concerned about the poor management of our nation's airports. So Bill C-27, by imposing a one size fits all regime, fixes problems that did not exist and creates a whole new bunch of problems by treating different airports similarly and similar airports differently.

All this leaves one asking what grave problem Bill C-27 was meant to solve. Given that parts 2, 3 and 4 dealing with airport authorities' legal status, corporate governance and obligations do not apply to places like Abbotsford, Kelowna and Hamilton or, for the moment, Edmonton or Calgary, it does not seem likely that issues such as corporate governance motivated the minister to table this bill.

Part 1 is one of four parts of Bill C-27 and would apply to all airports. In it we find clause 18. Subclause 18(1) reads as follows:

(1) Airport operators of airports serving international traffic must

(a) display the national flag of Canada, and erect signs welcoming passengers to Canada, in prominent places for arriving international passengers; and

(b) display the national flag of Canada at other prominent places on the airport.

We have the federal government mandating that there be flags in the airports. A pre-eminent concern for the state.

In my reading of Bill C-27 and the 1992 Airport Transfer (Miscellaneous Matters) Act, which is the act that started the process of handing over airports to airport authorities, this flag portion is one of the few clauses that is really new. It would almost seem to go without saying that the Canadian flag should be at Canadian airports, but surely this does not require legislation.

The Aéroports de Montréal website does not have either the Canadian or Quebec flags on it and neither does much of its printed material. However, there is a big Canadian flag on display greeting arriving passengers in English and in French together with a similar Quebec flag displaying a greeting for arriving passengers in French. Both of these were operational on Thursday, April 24, 2003.

If an airport is not more enthusiastic in its use of flags, that is not a problem. I do not believe that we can legislate patriotism, but apparently that is a pre-eminent preoccupation of the government. We have 35,000 Air Canada employees who could be completely out of work. We have airport authorities taxing Canadians. We have an air traveller security charge. We have a depression in the number of people flying. We have SARS and the government says that we need to mandate flags in airports.

The same kind of thinking can be found in part 4, clause 116 in the requirement of an airport authority to prominently display the Canadian flag. Subclause 116(1) reads:

(1) Every airport authority must

(a) display the national flag of Canada prominently at every air terminal building and at other places on the airport to which the public has access; and

(b) erect signs in prominent places at the entrance to the airport and to every air terminal building, proclaiming that the airport is owned by the Government of Canada.

(2) The Governor in Council may make regulations prescribing the locations of, dimensions of, and manner of displaying and erecting signs and displaying flags at their airport, and prescribing the contents of the signs.

However, clause 116 goes further than clause 18 in requiring the airport authorities to erect signs saying that the airport is owned by the Government of Canada. If the government believes that the ownership of buildings occupied by tenants have a higher profile, I would suggest it would begin by posting large “This building is owned by (blank)” signs on all Ottawa buildings that the federal government rents.

Curiously, clause 191 and 192 prescribe fines, a fine of up to $100,000 for every day an offence is committed. Therefore, if Bill C-27 passes, the airports better call the flag and sign folks rather quickly.

Clauses 16 and 118 are essentially silly, but at least one industry source has told my office that he believes this is the primary motivation for Bill C-27 as there were no calls by either the airlines or airports or the public to codify the status quo with a flawed one size fits all regime.

To the extent that one might tend to support Bill C-27, because of a desire to wave the flag, it is important to understand that any potential benefit to flag visibility would be more than outweighed by the flawed one size fits all regime of Bill C-27. This not only forces different airports to a common standard, but it also treats similarly sized former Transport Canada facilities and municipal airports differently. This is not just a flaw in Bill C-27. It has a serious commercial impact on airport authorities.

For example, clause 57 would limit an airport authority's ability to invest in another corporation to just 2% of gross revenues per year. The Vancouver airport authority, YVR, which owns the profitable YVR airport services, YVRAS, is concerned that this clause would limit its ability to finance YVRAS's projects in Chile, Jamaica or Hamilton. YVR writes:

...investment opportunities do not come in neat bundles, nor do they arise every year. (This) is also a demonstration of an “Ottawa knows better” (idea) than the community based board about what is good for the community (and the airport).

YVRAS operates 12 airports in five countries and competes against management subsidiaries run by Amsterdam Schiphol and London Heathrow. This is partially in response to page 49 of Transport Canada's national airports policy of July 1994 which talked of contributing “to the future competitiveness of Canada worldwide”. More recently federal cabinet ministers have promoted YVRAS's bids in other countries. Section 57 is a major reversal in Canadian airport policy.

However, the dual regime proposed by Bill C-27 makes section 57 doubly unfair because it would apply to airports like Vancouver but not nearby competitors such as Kelowna and Abbotsford.

Another case of uneven treatment of Bill C-27 is the way it deals with corporate governance. Airlines have been contacting my office to ensure that they will play a greater role in influencing terminal design in order to reduce costs and possibly opulence.

Section 64 requires that the board must collectively have experience in “law, engineering, accounting, management in the air carrier industry”, but there is no specific requirement for the board to have a single representative from the airline industry or general aviation at all.

This is in stark contrast to Nav Canada, the private company that handles air traffic control in Canada. Given the ability of airport authorities to impose greater fees and passenger fees as well as seize certain aircraft, the lack of mandatory aviation industry representation is a fatal flaw of Bill C-27. Although section 97 requires the airport authority to meet with carriers once a year, this is a poor substitute for specific tangible power in terms of board representation.

I am not necessarily arguing for the Nav Canada model, but there should be room on the board of 15 people who run a major airport for at least one of those people to be named specifically by the airline industry. Like section 57, section 64 only applies to former Transport Canada facilities, so the board of directors at Thunder Bay must follow the requirements of Bill C-27. But Hamilton, which is growing more quickly, can follow its own independent bylaws.

Another clause that only applies to former Transport Canada facilities and that clearly shows the shaky ethical grasp of the Liberal government is section 96. It reads:

96(1) An airport authority must disclose any contracts involving expenditures in excess of $100,000 that were not awarded under a public bid solicitation process, the name of the contracting party, the purpose and value of the contract and the reasons why a public bid solicitation process was not followed.

Section 96 does not require a tender process for any project under $100,000. Worse, it also exempts larger projects from the tender process as long as the airport authority discloses that no bids were solicited for that project. Potentially, everything from truck purchases to consulting contracts could involve favoured, non-arm's length suppliers.

When we realize that just last October Transport Canada was looking into millions of dollars of untendered, non-arm's length contracts and questionable dealings connected with the Port of Digby, we would think that the government would apply higher standards to airport authorities. When we realize that the government wants to oblige 100% of airports to display the Canadian flag, but it is willing to let an airport authority hand $99,000 in contracts to its friends with no problem, we see an Alfonso Gagliano-type politics at work in the bill. Surely Canadians deserve better.

In closing, Bill C-27 is a dramatic failure on the part of the government. There are smaller airports that are struggling. We have a SARS problem, depressed consumer confidence, shaky fuel prices, an airport security tax that is unanimously opposed by every single stakeholder in the transport community, and constant problems in the airline industry, some 35,000 people whose jobs may be potentially lost at Air Canada.

The airline industry in Canada is in precarious times right now and the government puts forward Bill C-27 which does nothing to address any of the substantively crumbling pillars of Canada's airline industry. It is a bad bill. It is poorly written with non-priorities. It is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by a Liberal transport minister who has shown zero leadership. Eight air carriers died in the six years that he has been transport minister. He has been a complete failure with regard to the air industry. With Bill C-27, we see that he has learned nothing from his mistakes.

[Stan Keyes, Liberal, Hamilton West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, at first blush it worries my considerably that the Canadian Alliance Party thanks and congratulates me on the work I am doing. That troubles me somewhat.

The member spoke about the management at Hamilton airport and said that it was really the business of WestJet. If it were not for TradePort and the management at the airport, they would not be out in the marketplace luring companies like WestJet to use Hamilton as its eastern hub. They went out and made their case for Hamilton demonstrating to WestJet that Hamilton was the place for it to locate.

Quite frankly, it is not just that passenger loads have gone from some 23,000 in 1999 to last year in 2002, 385,000 passengers at Hamilton. Hamilton is an extremely important and busy centre for cargo. Hamilton airport between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. becomes a city onto itself, with the activity going on at Purolator, UPS and all the other carriers that transport cargo.

The hon. member's direct question was whether I would stand and vote against the bill if nothing was done to it. I am going to see the glass half full. When the bill goes to the Standing Committee on Transport and we hear from witnesses and the cases they make on Bill C-27, I have every confidence that the amendments will be put to the bill that will drastically improve the bill and continue down the path that we began many years ago; that is to allow businesses to continue to do business and not let government interfere with that business.

[Stan Keyes, Liberal, Hamilton West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I started to say in my remarks late yesterday before the House adjourned its regular business, there is extreme concern in the airport community that Bill C-27, if not amended, would cripple an airport's ability to continue to work in what is clearly a very competitive international market.

Yesterday I spoke about how the air transportation industry has had an enormous impact on the Canadian economy. I pointed out that the viability of Canada's air transportation system is threatened and the consequences for Canada are enormous. I also gave reasons why the industry is in crisis today. I said that airports must adjust to the new realities of air travel, reduced frequency and the withdrawal of service. This means airports will have to reduce costs in order to minimize impacts on airlines and air travellers.

I stressed that the federal government too must act to cut costs to airports so these may be passed along to airlines in the form of lower fees and charges, and to air travellers in the form of lower air fares.

Ironically, at a time when the federal government should be reducing the operating costs of airports, the proposed Canada airports act, Bill C-27, does just the opposite. The proposed act, which would effectively re-regulate an economic sector that the government effectively and successfully deregulated eight years ago, piles one administrative redundancy upon another and introduces over 40 areas in which the minister may pass regulations, adding to the administrative burden of Canada's small airports.

The government is introducing these drastic measures without a single, overarching public demand for change and without having conducted a single regulatory impact or cost benefit analysis. In fact, a number of independent and government commissioned studies recommended a course of action substantially different from the government's proposed legislation.

I declared my bias and it is called John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport. I quoted from a letter to me from Mr. Tony Battaglia, president and CEO of TradePort International Corporation, operator of Hamilton airport. I read from his letter which said:

The act will have a profound impact on the growth of John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport. The act's one size fits all approach to airport government conflicts with Hamilton's unique and award winning public private partnership between the city of Hamilton and TradePort International, a private company operating the airport under terms of a 40 year lease. The act impedes the ability of the private operator to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs in order to improve service and reduce costs. The act significantly erodes local control by the community—a founding principle of the Canada Airports Policy (1995).

Those are the concerns of a smaller airport like Hamilton, but what about larger airports like the Vancouver International Airport authority?

YVR is concerned that Bill C-27 would diminish Canada's reputation as a well respected source for excellent foreign international airport operators such as the Vancouver International Airport authority and its subsidiary YVR Airport Services Limited. It says that the bill would cripple or kill the ability of progressive airport managers, such as YVRAS, to compete in the international arena and provide much needed management and operator expertise to small and medium sized domestic airports. It also would negatively impact on small airports that need the type of management and operational expertise that larger airports can provide through consultant or management services in the manner that YVRAA provides through its subsidiary, YVRAS airports, to places like Kamloops, Cranbrook, Fort St. John and to more medium sized airports such as Moncton and my home town of Hamilton.

YVR says that the bill would reduce or eliminate opportunities and employment for Canadian architects, engineers, lawyers, professional advisors, designers and project managers in the field of overseas management and development of foreign airports.

Foreign governments are particularly attracted to the management skills of well run airports such as Vancouver. The fact that YVRAS has developed to the point that it should be able to stand on its own reputation is clouded by the views of foreign governments. They want the reputation, expertise and backup like an airport like Vancouver International can provide.

Realistically the development of these types of businesses and positive effects that it has on the Canadian economy is based on well run large Canadian airport authorities exporting reputation, expertise, technology and technical services through subsidiary airport operator management corporations and/or joint ventures.

The market for foreign airport privatization is huge. Today, while less than 5% of the world's airports are privatized, the World Bank forecasts that the operation of 150 airports will be transferred from government to the private sector within just the next few years. Several leading companies have identified airport privatization as a new strategic industry for the 21st century. This creates huge opportunities for Canadians that should not be stifled. That is the view of an airport such as Vancouver.

Devolution of airports to local control has been instrumental in the evolution of Canadian airports from money losing government run entities into full cost recovery operations under the principle of user pay. The government's vision document “Straight Ahead” says:

Transportation policy must provide market frameworks that allow carriers and infrastructure providers to adapt, innovate, remain competitive and serve the public.

Yet Bill C-27 creates a static, inflexible governance regime. The devolution of the Hamilton airport, for example, to local ownership and management has been an overwhelming success. By 2002 the local operator, TradePort, had invested over $25 million and attracted another $48 million in private sector investment at our airport.

Hamilton International Airport's economic impact study completed in 2002 found that there were 1,550 direct jobs at the airport, up over 116% since TradePort took over its management.

Hamilton International Airport's direct contribution to GDP is $170 million and that is up 129% since 1996. Its total economic output is $410 million, up 224% over the same period. Taxes paid to three levels of government by the airport community exceed $32 million.

In spite of all these successes, the Canada airports act includes 210 sections to micromanage the country's airports. By way of comparison, the entire Canada Transportation Act, which as we know governs rail, transit, marine and airlines, has only 280 sections.

My fear is that Bill C-27 embeds in legislation that which is normally dealt with through regulation. The bill will go before the Standing Committee on Transport shortly and I for one will be keeping an eye on this legislation.

It is quite obvious that we have a success story since deregulation. According to the airports and the airport authorities that have contacted many of us here in the House, and my particular concern is for Hamilton airport, I think demonstrates that a return from a deregulated industry of the mid-1990s to a re-regulated industry serves no useful purpose.

Again, I look forward to seeing the bill at committee stage when we conclude our second reading debate. I think it will be very important to go clause by clause through the bill and have these witnesses come before us to demonstrate to us why the government should proceed in the way it is proceeding and why we should not do everything we can possible to help the industry, not through re-regulating the industry but through those administrative practices that can encourage them to grow, to continue to grow in the fashion they are growing.

[Stan Keyes, Liberal, Hamilton West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, first let me thank my colleagues from Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore and Saint John who are giving me this opportunity to speak. I rise on behalf of my constituents in Hamilton West to address second reading of Bill C-27, the Canada airports act.

There is extreme concern in the airports community that Bill C-27, if not amended, would cripple an airport's ability to continue to work in what is clearly a very competitive international market. It is no secret that the air transportation industry has an enormous impact on the Canadian economy. It creates over 300,000 jobs, accounts for over $34 billion in economic outputs, and provides nearly $4 billion in tax benefits to all levels of government.

Today, the viability of Canada's air transportation system is threatened and the consequences for Canada are enormous. It is a well known fact that the airline industry is in crisis. The impacts of 9/11, the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and SARS have led to a 20% reduction in air traffic. Air Canada's restructuring will have a dramatic impact on smaller airport communities where Air Canada is the dominant and/or sole air carrier.

Airports must adjust to the new realities of air travel. Reduced frequency and withdrawal of service mean airports will have to reduce costs in order to minimize impacts on airlines and of course air travellers.

The federal government too must act to cut costs to airports so that these may be passed along to airlines in the form of lower fees and charges, and to air travellers in the form of lower airfares. Ironically, at a time when the federal government should be reducing the operating costs of airports the proposed Canada airports act does just the opposite. The act, which effectively re-regulates an economic sector which the government effectively and successfully de-regulated eight years ago, piles one administrative redundancy upon another and introduces over 40 areas in which the minister may pass regulations adding to the administrative burden of Canada's smaller airports.

The government is introducing these drastic measures without a single overarching public demand for change and without having conducted a single regulatory impact or cost benefit analysis. In fact, a number of independent and government commissioned studies have recommended a course of action substantially different from the government's proposed legislation. These include: first, a moratorium leading to a reduction and eventual elimination of airport rents; second, removal of industry specific security surcharges--no other type of traveller is required to pay directly for security and policing services--third, full funding for ACAP and making these capital funds available to all level two airports; and fourth, substantial reduction of regulatory burdens.

I declare my bias and it is called John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport. According to Mr. Tony F. Battaglia, President and CEO of TradePort International Corporation, and operator of the Hamilton airport:

The act will have a profound impact on the growth of John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport. The act's one size fits all approach to airport government conflicts with Hamilton's unique and award winning public private partnership between the city of Hamilton and TradePort International, a private company operating the airport under terms of a 40 year lease. The act impedes the ability of the private operator to innovate and adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs in order to improve service and reduce costs. The act significantly erodes local control by the community--a founding principle of the Canada Airports Policy (1995).

The John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport is unique in Canada; between 1999 and 2002 passenger volumes have grown exponentially--from 23,000 in 1999 to 846,000 in 2002. In the next five years passenger volumes will grow sixfold--to about five million passengers annually--and HIA will become the fifth or sixth largest airport in Canada. Under the act, the ability of HIA to attain this growth is substantially impaired. Growth of this magnitude requires a significant investment in airport infrastructure--over $100 million must be raised in the capital markets.

By adding to the airport's cost structure and impeding its ability to set fees and charges to match revenues with expenses, the act imposes an element of risk that private sector lenders may be unwilling to accept. Blindly advancing this gratuitous legislation may bring irreparable harm to Canada's smaller airports; there are other alternatives. We suggest the following:

Phased implementation of the act with Canada's Schedule II airports exempt from its provisions until three years after its proclamation.

Schedule II airports would have three years to file with the Minister of Transport an operating model that satisfies the act's governing principles of transparency and accountability.

As operators of the John C. Munro Hamilton International Airport, we stand willing to work with the federal government and parliamentarians to find solutions that meet the needs of the government, the aviation industry, and air travellers.

It is signed by Tony F. Battaglia, President and CEO.

I could go on because the problem also impacts larger airports such as Vancouver airport. I do not know if it is appropriate, Mr. Speaker, but given the time, may I ask for the unanimous consent of the House to complete my remarks which would take no more than five minutes?

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate today on Bill C-27, an act respecting airport authorities and other airportoperators and amending other acts.

As the member for Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel and as transportation critic, I had the opportunity to review the legislation on airport authorities, since the Mirabel airport is managed by an airport authority called ADM, Aéroports de Montréal.

When a minister or other member of the Liberal Party introduces a bill as a means to have more transparency, we obviously always look at these nice proposals with an open mind.

In Mirabel, we had quite an exercise in transparency with ADM. All reporters and all Quebeckers who have followed the Mirabel airport saga know that Aéroports de Montréal did not operate with a great concern for transparency.

We sometimes use harsh words out of frustration with certain situations. I will try to explain the position of the residents of the Basses-Laurentides area concerning what could have been the best chance for economic development in this region of Quebec.

In 1966, when the federal government decided to replace Dorval airport, which was built in 1941, it really wanted to put Quebec back on the map. I should remind members that, at the time, Montreal was the only international gateway into Canada. Building a brand new airport was obviously indicative of a great desire to open our door to the world.

And it was not just any kind of airport. At the time, the government expropriated 93,000 acres of land, which was 10 times the size of the largest airport in the world and 27 times the size of Dorval airport. That was the goal of the Liberal government of the day.

Since 1966, or over the last forty and some years, the Liberal Party has been in power two thirds of the time. It is the Liberal Party that launched this project and set this goal. There were periods when the Conservatives were in office but, in the end, this is part of the history of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Giving Quebec a giant airport, the largest in the world, is a very important goal. Now we must see what the goal was and what the reality is today. Right now, Mirabel airport still sits on 15,000 acres of land, which is still four times the size of Dorval airport.

However, this international airport deals with only one air carrier, Air Transat, which is quite happy. In the Lower Laurentians, we are very glad that Air Transit is still doing business in Mirabel. ADM has announced that in the fall of 2003 or the spring of 2004 at the latest, international flights or air passenger services will be a thing of the past at Mirabel airport.

As you know, that is the harsh reality we have to face. Things happen, like the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 or SARS which is currently affecting some airports, but ADM and the federal government took their decision well before air carriers throughout Canada started having problems.

Of course, that brings us to the operations of the infamous airport authorities, which have been a problem. Since 1988, we have been dealing with what is now called a non-profit corporation. First, there was SOPRAM, which was created in 1988 but was replaced in 1992 by Aéroports de Montréal, the current organization that this new bill will now change.

Non-profit organizations are currently managing equipment belonging to the people of Quebec and Canada and also funds. Let me go over some of the provisions of this bill to try to explain how it is possible to close down an airport that was inaugurated only in 1975 while investing in another airport, Dorval. At this point in time, over $800 million of public money has been invested. When renovations started at Dorval, we were told that they would cost $200 million at the very most. Believe it or not, the costs have now reached $800 million. Based on the most recent estimates, to properly upgrade Dorval for the new millennium, we will need to invest another $1.2 billion in the airport and the surrounding road infrastructure. That is $2 billion that the federal government will have invested in a airport that should have been replaced back in 1966, when Dorval and all of its facilities were felt to be obsolete.

However, today, this airport is being renovated but there are constraints. Indeed, Dorval is an airport in the middle of a city, with time constraints. Flights must not take place after 11 p.m. So there are time constraints. When Mirabel airport is closed, this will be the only airport capable of receiving passengers in the metropolitan area of Montreal. Of course, this will create constraints for airlines.

This is a matter of choice. When we put the question directly to the minister, to all the representatives, to Liberal members from Quebec, they say: “We will go back to Mirabel one day”. Why? Because Mirabel airport is located outside Montreal. The runways have been laid out so as not to disturb the urban populations. It is a highly secure airport. Considering September 11, 2001, we never want to experience another plane crash in an urban area. Thus, everything should have been taken into account, particularly since September 11, 2001, to try to keep Mirabel airport. On the contrary, a destruction operation started in 1992—in fact, in 1988—but more specifically since the creation of the new ADM. This destruction operation will continue, of course, because passenger services will disappear, as I said earlier, by January 2004 at the latest.

Besides, we are still being told that Mirabel is an international airport. Of course, people were up in arms. Not only was there land flipping, but proceedings were launched by the municipality of Mirabel and all social and economic stakeholders. Millions of dollars were spent. It was ruled that the lease had been respected , since ADM had an obligation to maintain an international airport.

Clause 6 of this brand new bill that has not yet been passed says:

Nothing in this Act derogates from the rights and obligations under a lease of an airport granted by any person, including Her Majesty in right of Canada, to an airport operator, as the lease read on the coming into force of this section, except to the extent that those rights and obligations are inconsistent with this Act.

That means that a lease takes precedence over this bill. Obviously, I would like to agree with the content of the bill, but I have to live with the situation in Mirabel. People are living with the situation in the Lower Laurentians in West Quebec. The airport authority there is going to eliminate passenger traffic, insisting it is still operating an international airport, and the government and the minister will say “Yes, we consider this to be an international airport”. An international airport without passengers is hard to swallow.

What is really going to happen in the industry? Will legal proceedings be taken again against ADM to compel it to abide by the lease? As long as the government is not willing to rein in these organizations that are claiming to be non profit, it will not work.

The government has quite the defence, of course. I am saying this for the benefit of Quebeckers who are listening to us; I will sum up how the airport authority board is set up. It is made up of between 11 and 15 members, their number being set in the bylaws.

In the case of the Montreal airport authority there are 15 appointed board members. The government is saying that the management of airports is being turned over to the industry. Out of these 15 appointed board members, only one is from the Lower Laurentians and the Mirabel area. As far as the other 14 are concerned, 11 come from the Island of Montreal, one from Laval and two from the South Shore.

Once again, we are told that the management is local. Obviously, the managers are not coming from Mirabel airport. When the time comes to make big decisions, it is obviously easy to reach a consensus around the Montreal airport board table.

This bill is telling us there will be greater transparency, but it confirms that independent bodies will manage assets. I will go even further than that. Clause 45 says:

An airport authority is not an agent of Her Majesty in right of Canada.

So it is not only non-profit organizations managing the government's assets. Clearly, the land and buildings belong to the federal government. They belong to us all because we all pay taxes in this country. The assets are managed by independent agencies that, furthermore, are not agents of Her Majesty in right of Canada.

So, why include this provision? It is so that the minister can say, in the House, in response to questions from the opposition about the actions of airport authorities: “It is not my responsibility. Those people do not report to the federal government”.

We had a terrible time with this in the Lower Laurentians and at Mirabel. We are going to go through this again. In fact, ADM is holding its annual general meeting on May 8. According to my sources, I am almost certain that ADM will announce the complete shutdown of the airport and will expect its board to adopt, next Thursday, a resolution to launch an international call for tenders for the use of the airport, hotel and administrative offices, excluding tenders related to running an airport. In other words, ADM wants to see if the airport, hotel and administrative offices can be converted into something other than an airport. That is the goal, although it says it will respect the lease and that this will remain an international airport, because Mirabel still offers cargo operations.

I do not know how members with international airports in their ridings would feel if an airport authority candidly told them that it did not want to launch an international tender call for aviation operations, because it was too afraid of the competition. There are people interested in using this site for civil aviation and passenger transportation. So, ADM does not want to manage it.

The hotel has been closed since last summer. There have been at least six potential buyers and ADM has said publicly, “We operate airports; we are not hotel managers”. The hotel belongs to the federal government. In the lease, there is a clause stipulating that they must use the buildings and infrastructure for the purposes for which they were entrusted. That is a clause in the lease.

The hotel was entrusted to be operated. Today, they can contravene the lease with the Minister of Transport's approval, since he responded here in the House that it was an independent organization and it could do what it wanted. He trusted ADM because ADM has the obligation to maintain an airport of international calibre.

Those who know anything about aviation predict that three years from now even the cargo sector will have left Mirabel. The airport will cease to be. In this bill, once ADM has been given all of the powers it needs to reach its objectives, how will it be possible to save Mirabel?

It will be impossible. The government should modify the lease and allow ADM to close Mirabel airport.

Obviously, there would be a debate. How would the government do it? It would wait until the election and make the change in the first year of its new mandate, so that voters forget about it. Governments always operate in the same old ways. When you follow things and see how good the Liberal government is at controlling information, you can predict how people will react. We know the important stuff occurs before the election and a month or two after. Then it comes around again three and a half or four years later.

Polling indicates—and you may have had the opportunity to see some polls—that attitudes toward politicians in Quebec differ a great deal from those of the rest of Canada, where the central governments are chosen by the people, whereas in Quebec, it is the complete opposite. Local governments are the ones that are most loved by Quebeckers. That is traditional and probably historic. We could always take a closer look at what has happened.

Yet the Liberal government is fully aware that, in Quebec, the public is far less concerned about federal government operations and this therefore allows the feds to stir up great hopes as it did with Mirabel. It created a huge potential for employment and now it is going to be closed down completely.

There cannot even be any predictions because as we speak, believe it or not, Mirabel, the biggest airport in Canada, as far as area goes, still has no development plan. Even with the lease requirement of the provision of a master plan and a development plan by 1998, there is still none, yet they say there is a master plan.

It is so complex, but I can tell you that they do not know, at this time, what they are going to do with Mirabel. Never mind whether one calls it a master plan, a development plan or a land use plan, I can tell you they have no idea. If they are asked the question tomorrow, they will say they do not know what they will do with Mirabel.

One thing they do know: passenger flights are going to disappear and they will try to keep the freight for the moment, despite what the reports are saying.

Leafing through the bill, I must express my resentment of it, despite its possible good intentions. We are told, of course, that the role of an airport operator is to give equitable access to its facilities. Clause 24 reads:

Every airport authority and other airport operator must provide to all air carriers who operate or wish to operate aircraft on their airport, equitable access to the facilities or air terminal building—

Having spoken with executives of Air Transat, which is at Mirabel, I can tell you that they are still interested in remaining there. They want to stay, but of course the approach that has been taken by ADM and the company to get it out of Mirabel will leave them without the same access to facilities at the same price. There have been threats along the lines of “You are the only ones flying out of this airport, so we will charge all costs to you”. This will make it more expensive than flying out of Montreal. So there have been threats.

Even though the carrier has a lease with obligations, even though, legally, it could go to court and try to protect its rights, things are not easy for an operator in such a situation, with all the complexities of aviation today.

In addition, even though the Government of Canada is the owner, it is clear that ADM acts as the landlord, managing the facilities, negotiating with the airlines and, in the end, saying to them, “If you do not move to Dorval, you will have big problems in the future. We will send you bills and you will be fighting them in court”. That battle will last 15 years, until their lease runs out.

Here is a company that provides very good service, that is quite satisfied to be at Mirabel, and which has another 15 years on its lease, but, under pressure from ADM, will probably sign a new agreement to move to Dorval, if it has not yet already done so as we speak. Nobody is supposed to talk about it; it all has to be done oh so nicely and under a cloak of secrecy. No pressure must be put on ADM. No one should say anything, because that might reflect badly on the company and on operations.

Finally, one thing I know is that it is bad for the entire population of the Lower Laurentians and West Quebec. If there had been transfers to other airports in Quebec, I would have said, “That is not so bad”. The problem is that the shift is towards Toronto and Ottawa. That is a fact.

One problem is that those who manage the Montreal airports have not understood that they are not helping Quebec; they are helping the rest of Canada. That is what they are doing. They are helping the Ottawa airport, which has been expanded, and that is good for Ottawa. They are helping Toronto, which has picked up all the transferred flights, and now finds itself the new gateway into Canada.

All this has been to Quebec's detriment, and it has been done with the full knowledge of all the federal Liberal members from Quebec and all the Conservative members at the time. They watched as all this happened. Obviously—I say it again—the Liberal members were especially involved, since they were in power for more than two thirds of the last 40 years while the Mirabel saga was unfolding.

Of course, when we see concern for transparency in a bill and when we hear the minister say, in his press conference on Bill C-27, that the government will stop having airports managed by organizations that do it behind closed doors, we cannot imagine how things can be different. These organizations have been doing everything behind closed doors since they were created. I cannot see how they could show any concern for transparency. It will be very hard.

Moreover, passengers who use Mirabel airport are required to pay enormous fees to repair Dorval airport. All those who have flown from Mirabel airport over the last eight years, since the fees were implemented, have been paying for the renovations at Dorval airport. Imagine that. I would not say it is Machiavellian, but close. That is the way things are done. People are told that they will have better services. The authority took the money and renovated Dorval airport.

Everything is done in secrecy. The government tells anyone with whom it deals not to say anything, that it will make an announcement. Of course, at the general meeting that will take place on May 8, there will be a big press conference and we will all be handed a done deal. We will not have the opportunity to object and to criticize; the decision will already have been made.

Why? Because, as I mentioned earlier, these non-profit organizations are not accountable to the federal government. They are completely independent and I should add that they are also financially self-sufficient. They are given the power they need to find money. It is as simple as that.

In fact, clause 46(3) reads as follows:

An airport authority may issue a bond ordebenture or other evidence of indebtedness.

And that is done, of course, without any endorsement from the federal government, but rather on the sole basis of expected revenues, which are the projected revenue from the airport improvement fees collected from the users, because that is the beauty of all this. These people have clients. They go to the banks and say “Look”. And they end up with the same credit rating as any Crown corporation and they can contract loans. During all that time, nobody is held accountable. It is a very profitable deal for those who charge interest rates. There is no risk involved. The money is not used to run deficits. Have you any idea how far a director can go? Some people have heard directors say “If things do not work out, the federal government can take the airport back.” It is as simple as that. Of course, there are the buildings, the land, the runways, the hotel. All of that belongs to the federal government. The directors only manage the buildings and have the duty, as I said before, to maintain two international airports.

I find that quite incredible, which is why I would like to go over clause 6 one more time.

Nothing in this Act derogates from the rights and obligations under a lease of an airport—

This provision puts the lease above the bill. It has always been that way. They have never upheld the law. They have always had their own way. The minister has always said “Yes, you are doing good; everything is going well, it is up to you. We will not get involved in what you are doing”. Why? Because it is politically dangerous and might even be politically devastating. That is how governments behave nowadays. Discussions are held and then the onus is put on independent organizations who are subjected to incredible political pressure.

The problem is that, often, these are people who are appointed, because there are representatives appointed by the government. In this case, we will have an appointment process that is well indicated in the legislation. Yes, these are representatives of the area, appointed by organizations in the area, but the fact is that Montreal's north shore and the Basses-Laurentides, excluding Laval, will only have one representative. It is not the new board and the new process that the bill is proposing that will change anything.

For us, ADM has already changed. Last year, the type of board contained in this bill was introduced. For all those who thought that, with this new bill, a new way of operating or appointing directors would be introduced, it is too late. In Quebec, things were going so bad that everyone had to get involved to get rid of the old directors, among others, the old chief executive officer. The process was changed and we have the new board of directors.

Bill C-27 is already in force. The Mirabel area, the Basses-Laurentides and Montreal's north shore, excluding Laval, only have one representative out of 15 members of the board. Consequently, the future is not looking good.

In this bill, there are airport authorities. I see that several airports are jointly managed. But Ottawa and Halifax manage only one airport. I even dare to dream that we could perhaps think about having an airport authority for Mirabel and one for Dorval. We could perhaps abolish ADM, which is managing two airports, but which is bleeding one dry to try to make the other one survive. Perhaps we will see this one day. Perhaps the Bloc Quebecois will introduce a bill or an amendment to this bill. Except that it would really take the will of the people to make this happen.

I know perfectly well that it will not happen since I asked the question to ADM officials. That is why they will put out an international call for tenders for the terminal, the hotel and the administrative buildings. When I talk about an international call for tenders, it is to find a new vocation for the property. They will look at the international level to see what someone could do with an empty hotel, an empty administrative centre and an empty terminal, apart from operating a passenger airport, which any interested party will be told they cannot do.

That is the decision that will be made, believe it or not. I am preparing a nice question to ask of the minister the next day or a few days later. I will ask him if he thinks that ADM's position respects the terms of the lease. He will certainly answer that, yes, it still is an international airport because of the freight operations. Some international airports rely solely on freight.

But those who know the history of air transportation know that the newer passenger aircraft have more and more space in the cargo hold for the transportation of goods. That is how airlines make flights profitable, which allows them to reduce fares for passengers. Aircraft are made bigger so they can carry more cargo. As a result, cargo planes are disappearing, slowly but surely, in favour of bigger passenger planes. That is a fact.

But once again, they think people on Montreal's north shore or in the Basses-Laurentides and all over Quebec do not understand how the industry works. They are telling them, “Look, you have a nice cargo airport, which is going to be developed and remain an international airport”.

No matter how much we hope, how much we read into bills such as this one, how much we try to be encouraged and to encourage our fellow citizens, this is not the first time the federal government slaps the Basses-Laurentides in the face.

Of course, my colleague from Terrebonne—Blainville can attest to it. A decision was made to close the GM plant in Boisbriand. Ontario finally managed to eliminate car manufacturing in the rest of Canada and maintain it in the province. We know full well that it is the minister in charge of Canada's economic development in Quebec's regions, the current justice minister, who announced after visiting Detroit and meeting with the executives at GM Canada that he had no choice and that the GM plant in Boisbriand had to be shut down.

Mirabel international airport will be closed to passenger traffic. What it will become will be announced in a matter of months or days. It is tough to be repeatedly slapped in the face by the federal government.

It is not true that the federal government cannot act; however, it is true it does not want to act. That is the truth. Of course, Bill C-27 is a perfect example. I can predict that even before Bill C-27 is passed, Mirabel airport will be closed to passenger traffic. That is what is going to happen. This bill will be dragged through the House long enough so that the government will not have to force ADM to abide by this new bill, especially section 6 that would compel it to respect the terms of the lease and not to do anything that would be contrary to the lease since it has precedence over the bill. That is what will happen. ADM is in a hurry. We know. Air Transat is being pressured. ADM is rushing ahead to make sure everything is done before May 8 to be able to make the announcement at the general annual meeting. It is rushing to announce Air Transat is moving.

Why? Because ADM does not want Bill C-27 to be adopted. It does not want to have to deal with other problems. It has already had to deal with the hotel owner's wrath. About $17 million had to be paid to the hotel owner because, clearly, the profit projections are not quite what they were when the lease was negotiated. The owner won. An appeal has been launched. Obviously, in the meantime, this is costing hundreds of jobs in this sector. This hotel was not just for passengers; it was also used for other purposes and had built a reputation over the years. That is why so many hotel owners would like to purchase it.

The harsh reality is that ADM does not give a—there are things we are not permitted to say in the House—hoot what the residents of Mirabel, the Basses-Laurentides, Quebec and Canada might think. It does not care. It wants to try to save what remains of the aviation industry in Quebec, again by choosing the wrong solution, which is to try to direct road and air traffic toward Montreal Island.

On every island in the industrialized world, traffic is being directed elsewhere to try to set up offices for white collar workers. Pretty suburbs are created too, all to try keep the big stuff outside, including airports. In this respect, Montreal will always be doing the opposite, controlled by the West Island of Montreal—how wonderful—which prefers to deal with Toronto than the rest of Quebec.

This is the reality. It has always been like this. It always will be. I cannot imagine things being any different, although maybe some day they will. That will be the day that Quebeckers create their own country. Perhaps then people will see that by helping someone else, you help yourself. Charity begins at home. So, the people of Quebec must understand that they must do unto themselves before they do unto others.

That is the harsh reality. Once again, the federal government had created high expectations within the population of Quebec. Let me go over the figures one more time, because they are incredible. The government had set aside 93,000 acres of land, that is 27 times the Mirabel airport and 10 times the largest airport in the world. That is what Mirabel was at the beginning. Nowadays, it is still one of the biggest airports in the world. Even if almost 75,000 acres have been given back to the expropriated, it still sits on over 15,000 acres of land and that is four times the size of Dorval airport. Once again, this airport will disappear with what? With an organization, ADM, that will argue that we will be going back to Mirabel one day; with a minister that will agree; with Liberal members from Quebec who will also tell us “One day, we will come back to Mirabel. It is unavoidable. Because of security issues. Because of all kinds of things”. In the meantime, $800 million has already been spent on Dorval and another $1.2 billion will be invested in that airport, with the requirement, under the new legislation, for greater transparency. There is a whole chapter on airport improvement fees. Air carriers have the tough duty to tell airport authorities, “You charge too much for improvements. The fees that we and the passengers have to pay are crippling the airline industry”.

I do not see how these costs can be reduced at Montreal. ADM has not finished and still has over $1 billion to invest in its facilities.

There will be an attempt by all companies, Air Canada leading the pack, to ask ADM to cut the charges. One way to do that is to reduce renovation expenses. Renovations are finished at some airports, but Montreal is only about one-third done. ADM cannot, therefore, cut its costs. Obviously, Mirabel will have disappeared, so there will be only Dorval left.

There is another issue: rents. Today the airlines are coming before the standing committee on transport to tell us that, if the industry is to be saved the federal government absolutely must reduce rents so that airports, airport administrations, can reduce the charges levied on the airlines. Our audience needs to understand that in Montreal ADM does not just charge user fees for hanger or facility renovations, but also charges the airlines fees. Each time loans are arranged or bonds are issued, these must be paid back. They need revenue from somewhere.

I can tell you that the Bloc Quebecois agrees. Rents must come down and this must have a direct impact on the airlines. Believe it or not, ADM has been making requests of me for more than three years, since I was elected. ADM wants to reduce the rents in order to invest, once again, in renovations for Dorval. That is the reality.

I cannot see how to make it work in Montreal, because ADM has already thought about reducing the rent paid to the federal government, but that was to free up cash to borrow more and put more money into Dorval. As people have said, in 20 years, that will be finished and they will come back to Mirabel.

Somewhere the idea of the high speed train to get to the Mirabel airport has been dropped. Believe it or not, the terminal, which was built in 1975, has a train station that has never been used because high speed trains were never brought in. However, there is a station.

It would have cost $350 million to finish both highways, highways 13 and 50, and to finish the access by high speed train. In 2000, the cost was up to $450 million. More than $2 billion will have been spent at Dorval and yet, one day, we are supposed to be back at Mirabel. That is the reality.

In closing, it has been a pleasure for me to take this time to try to help those Quebeckers and Canadians who are following understand that sometimes we have good reason to complain about the federal government's actions.

Obviously, for the residents of Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, of Terrebonne—Blainville, of Laurentides and Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, and all of the ridings that could have benefited from the major development as a result of the Mirabel airport and that never got that chance, I hope that this bill will allow us to wake up ADM or even the federal Liberal government. It is never too late to do the right thing. As long as we own 15,000 acres of land with good buildings and equipment, there is always hope that it can be made profitable. I hope that a ray of wisdom will beam down from the sky and enlighten the Liberal government, so that justice can be done for the Lower Laurentians region.

[Jim Gouk, Canadian Alliance, Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to stand to speak on Bill C-27 today. I listened with interest to the words of the parliamentary secretary to the minister and I will probably have some direct comments on some of those things if time permits.

With a bill like this, let us start with the worst. One of the worst things in the bill is that the powers of the minister are not subject to review or appeal. He gives himself awesome powers in the bill.

Let us just imagine how this would work in other areas like, for example, the former minister of finance, who says, “Let us close some of the tax loopholes in all these foreign countries where we have Canadian corporations that are getting tremendous tax benefits, but let us leave one open, Bermuda, let us say”, where, as it happens, the former minister of finance has all his ships in his private company registered, “and let us have that not subject to review or appeal”.

How about the former minister of public works and government services, who says, using these kinds of powers, “Let us have the power to award contracts without tender. Let us be able to send them out to our friends, our donors, and let us get into a big advertising scheme and pay these people whether they actually do the work we have contracted for or not”.

Or maybe we will have the former minister of justice, who will come up with a bill like Bill C-68, tell us that it is going to cost $2 million and, when it costs a billion, says, “That is fine. Let us leave it that way. Let us not review it and most certainly let us not have any appeal”.

Given the mistakes that the Liberal government and its various cabinet ministers have made in the past, I think the very notion that we would give any minister on that side of the House the powers to make decisions that are not subject to either review or appeal is absolutely absurd, yet that is exactly what Bill C-27 does.

I will now get to some of the specifics. One is airport authority directors. The authority makeup calls for up to 15 directors on the board and it is quite possible that there would not be so much as one person representing the airlines. The required makeup includes two from the federal government; we notice that the government always make sure that it is on the list. The mandatory requirements are two from the federal government, one from the provincial government, three to five from municipal government, and then three to five from two of the following five groups. To be sure, one of those five groups is the national association of domestic air carriers, but they do not have to use that one. The other alternatives are economic organizations, provincial associations of lawyers, engineers or accountants, community organizations and unions. Out of all of these three to five are taken. It is quite possible that in some cases there would not be so much as a single representative of the airlines on those boards.

This is a not for profit corporation we are talking about, the airport authority set up by the government, as the parliamentary secretary has stated. By contrast, the same government set up Nav Canada. Nav Canada also has 15 directors of which four are from the airlines and one general aviation representative on the board. Five out of 15, one-third of the board, are absolutely guaranteed to be from the aviation industry, yet for the airports of the country, the national airports, the government has a board that could quite conceivably end up with not so much as a single airline representative, yet they are the ones that have a primary interest. The primary paying customer of the airports is the aviation industry, but with this bill there is not a commitment to have even one industry representative on the board.

The airlines must have the ability to influence terminal designs in order to ensure that cost effective designs reduce costs. We can imagine how we could build a very elaborate and very fancy edifice with a lot of architectural oddities, wasted space, a lot of dramatic flare in the design and incredibly expensive furnishings, none of which are part of the functions of the airport. We do not want a bunch of ugly boxes dotting the country. We want buildings that are pleasant to be in and are effective for the flow of traffic and so on, but we all know that there are people who have a tendency to get carried away. With that very primary customer possibly not being on the board, there is nothing to prevent airport authorities from saying “We can charge pretty much what we want, add airport improvement fees, and build something pretty fancy. It would be a monument to our work and our board to have such an incredibly beautiful airport”.

We do like to have nice things, but we also like to have a functioning, cost effective airline industry, particularly at this time. We are finding out that the airline industry is having a tremendous amount of trouble staying afloat and the last thing we should be doing is coming forward with a bill that could add to those costs instead of trying to find ways to control them.

Speaking of controls, there needs to be some control on the rent that the federal government charges airports. The federal government used to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year in airport operations. Now it makes hundreds of millions of dollars and all the improvements that are done to the airports are done at no cost to the government; now there is a sweetheart deal. The government used to have airport landing fees and a variety of fees that it charged the airlines. It used to lose a lot of money and it still had to operate the airport and do any improvements.

I was in the aviation industry for many years and saw how bad many of these terminals were. In fact, even now some of them are still in the process of growing out of that neglect by government. Right here in Ottawa is a prime example. We have a very inadequate terminal in Ottawa, but as we drive up to it, we see a very beautiful new terminal being constructed off to the right. That new terminal will be in operation sometime next spring, actually ahead of schedule. It is being built by the Ottawa Airport Authority at no cost to the federal government. We have that wholly inadequate terminal, out of which we are still operating while the airport authority puts up the new building, yet the government is essentially gouging these airport authorities. The government is taking huge profits out of these businesses, if we want to call them that, on which it formerly lost money.

Government rent increases are exorbitant, not just from where the rents started but in regard to where they have gone since the government has had these airport authorities take over. For example, when the Winnipeg Airports Authority officially took over the operation of the Winnipeg airport in 1997, the rent was $900,000 a year. That is quite a bit of money. Basically it is $1 million a year. Since that time, the Winnipeg Airports Authority has made many improvements, none of which were funded by the federal government. It has done this through its own drive, through its own funds raised in operating the airport. The rent that the federal government will charge by the year 2007 will have increased to $7 million from $900,000 in 1997. No wonder the airline industry is in trouble. It gives new meaning to the old adage “I am from the government and I am here to help”. With that kind of help, it is a wonder we have an airline industry left at all.

National airports are not the only ones affected by bad government decisions of this nature. When the government, as the parliamentary secretary described, set about creating the national airports program, it also set about divesting itself of all the other airports in Canada, all the smaller feeder airports and community airports. The government pushed these onto the municipalities, many of which really did not want to take them. They did not want to be operating airports. They have enough responsibilities on their own. In my hometown, the airport of Castlegar used to lose, under the operation of Transport Canada, half a million dollars a year, so the government was telling Castlegar, a small community of about 7,000 people, “You had better take over the airport, because if you do not, no one will take it over, so we guess we do not need an airport and we will just shut it down”. That is a hell of a load, frankly, to put on a small community of 7,000 people.

At the time the government asked Castlegar to take over, it said there were certain things that the city would be able to do to be cost effective and to hopefully get rid of some of this deficit, because of course adding half a million dollars a year in costs for a small community like that would be absolutely devastating. Castlegar was allowed to put on an airport improvement fee. The parliamentary secretary said the minister was very generous, that he would allow the city to continue to operate it to cover operational costs. It is a good thing, because otherwise it could not operate that airport.

There is one other thing that was done. At the time the City of Castlegar took over the operation of its airport, there was an airport fire department with a full complement of staff, vehicles, facilities and everything. They were well-trained, very conscientious people and I want to make sure that no one misunderstands that. I am not in any way suggesting that airport firefighters are not highly motivated and well-trained, conscientious people. However, in many of these airports, they are largely unnecessary. I worked directly at airports for 22 years. During that 22 years of working at airports, I have never once seen a firefighter save a life, not because they are not properly trained or motivated but because the opportunity never arose.

First, to put it graphically, the aircraft, if that is what we are dealing with, has to have the decency to have its emergency at the airport. If it happens somewhere en route and comes down somewhere off the airport, then the fact that there is a fire department at the airport is irrelevant. Second, gruesomely but accurately, there have to be survivors. If there are no survivors, then the whole exercise is for naught as well. Third, in terms of response time, it has to happen suddenly and without notice. If an aircraft has a problem and is coming in to land, the people on board want you standing by. They are not going to wait until they get to the airport to tell you this; they radio ahead and advise. So firefighters do not necessarily have to be at the airport. They can come from some distance.

The federal government said, “We know that there are a lot of costs in operating airports like Castlegar. We know that we lost a lot of money. We also know that there has to be some level of protection for public safety. That is reasonable”. It said, “You do not necessarily need to have the firefighters stationed right at the airport if you can demonstrate to us an acceptable response time for bringing in those firefighters from somewhere else”.

Castlegar and many other airports like it did exactly that and said, “Here is our plan, here is the location, here is the distance, here is the staffing we have, here is the response time. It has been all properly demonstrated. We can do this. This is our plan, presented in detail”. The federal government said, “We accept your plan. Do you now accept the airport, with this and all the other conditions that have been agreed to?” And the City of Castlegar, and many others, over 70 of them, said, “Yes, we do”.

The federal government, having had these little communities accept these airports, now has come back with Canadian aviation regulations 308, CARs 308, which now potentially would place the onus on many of these small communities that run these airports. They basically took money losers off the hands of the federal government. They came to an agreement with the federal government before they took them over in which the government said, “You don't have to keep the firefighters on. We agree with your proposal. It is safe”. Now the government is saying, “We changed our mind. Thank you for taking over the airport. Thank you for getting this loser off our hands and coming up with better, more efficient ways to operate it than we ever could. Now we are going to force you to put the firefighters back at the airport”.

For small airports such Castlegar, or even small communities in some cases, that is an overwhelming expense to visit upon a community of 7,000 people. In some case they are spread over a bit bigger population. That is absolute total irresponsibility on the part of government. Yet the minister wants us to think this is a good bill when it does not even begin to address things like that.

I would like to talk about some of the things the government is involved in that also have not been dealt with in the bill, things where the government could be saving money. It is just like the example I gave on small community airports where the government was so inefficient and ineffective in its operation that it lost a fortune. We should look at the things for which it is still responsible, that it still actually operates or an operation it has taken over and see whether is cost effective.

I am talking now about airport security in general terms. I would like to give a couple of examples that really draw to light the fact that airport security, to a certain degree, is a myth. It is nothing but a facade to make people feel safe. It is something that stops an honest person from accidentally doing something wrong, like taking along a little penknife that he forgot was in their briefcase. It stops him from doing that. It does not stop someone who intends to take some form of weapon that could be used against other people on board an aircraft.

Let me give an example of that as it applies to security at the House of Commons, post-September 11. Undoubtedly, Mr. Speaker, you have noticed the large number of RCMP officers at the foot of the road coming into the House of Commons down by the Confederation building. Half of the parking lot, which used to be there, is gone. A great big trailer is there. There is a big covered inspection station. At any given time there are as many RCMP officers and RCMP vehicles at that location as most individual detachments in my entire riding have.

What is their purpose? Their purpose is to inspect vehicles that drive on to the hill. They stop them. They check who is driving them. They check where they are going and why they are going there. They may look in the trunk. They may look under the hood. They have fancy roll out mirrors that they can roll underneath to see if anything is attached.

One time I asked an RCMP officer why they did that and what was the purpose. The officer said that it was to make sure somebody did not take something into Parliament that was not allowed, that would be dangerous and that could be used for destructive purposes. It was to prevent terrorists from smuggling explosives on to the Hill.

The RCMP officers stop these cars, open their hoods and their trunks and roll fancy little silly mirrors underneath the vehicles. Maybe they are dripping water on to the mirrors. Right beside that station people off the street, coming from wherever, dressed in whatever manner, without any security or any connection with the House of Commons whatsoever, walk on to the Hill with backpacks, with shopping bags and with big packages of things. They come on the Hill not only at the bottom by Confederation building where the vehicles are stopped but at a number of points along Wellington. They just walk on the Hill. If this is about stopping explosives and all these other things, what is the point of looking under a car's hood when there are people who we do not know walking on to the Hill carrying backpacks?

I am not suggesting that we stop and search every person who comes on the Hill. I am showing the absurdity of looking under the hood of a car to ensure there is nothing tied to a tailpipe but not worrying about people, whoever they may be, coming on to the Hill with backpacks, shopping bags and whatever other method of conveying stuff on to the Hill that they might happen to use. It is absolutely absurd.

In my entire riding there are 27 communities, 18 city councils and two regional districts. It is 27,000 square kilometres. We have 100 RCMP in my riding. We have about 100 RCMP officers on the Hill, never mind the House of Commons security people.

RCMP officers are not inside the buildings. They are out there wielding these silly little mirrors underneath the cars and watching all the other entrances, not for the people with backpacks and shopping bags but to ensure that someone does not drive through. I pointed this out to them one time and they said that if those people tried to come into a building, then their backpacks and shopping bags would be checked. Why do we not check the vehicles when they come into the building? That is absurd.

However, if we are worried about what is in the vehicle, then why would we not be worried about a vehicle coming through without anything, being checked through and then having half a dozen people with big backpacks or whatever come and put them into cars. Now they are inside the parliamentary grounds and the car has whatever has been taken in unchecked in the trunk, or back seat or wherever else. The concept is absurd. When we get to airports, we have exactly the same concept: the facade of security.

We now have plastic knives on board aircraft. We get plastic knives but we get China plates, glass glasses and steel forks. When I fly, I have a meal on board Air Canada. I am given two steel forks. Something happened some time ago now. The trays are a little crowded. I was working and then dinner came, so I put my work away and had my dinner. One of the forks must have been knocked off the tray and landed in my briefcase unbeknownst to me. When I got home and took the stuff out of my suitcase I discovered I had one of these forks. Being an honest person, I wanted to return it to Air Canada because it certainly was not my intention to steal that fork.

The next time I went to the airport, I took the fork with me. When I got to airport security I put all my metal stuff, my pen, my organizer and my cell phone, into the little basket. I also included the fork because I certainly was not trying to sneak it on board the aircraft. Security looked at it and said that I could not take it on board. I asked why not? I asked the security officers where they thought I had got it? It had an Air Canada logo right on it. I told them that I would be given two more as soon as I got on board the plane. They said that they knew that, that it was silly but those were the rules. They confiscated the fork, and I presume that Air Canada never got it back. I was stopped from taking on board a steel fork. We are paying a fortune to stop people from taking on something that the airline will give them once they get on board anyway.

While I had that fork, I looked at it because there were some striking comparisons. A lot of people may have found that when they tried to get on board the aircraft, they were stopped because they had one of those little manicure clippers, the kind that people squeeze together to clip their nails. It has a tiny slide out file. People can take the clippers on board but the files have to be broken off. I had one of those at home which had not been modified for airport security. When I looked at the fork, much to my surprise the tines on the fork were longer than the file I was required to break off if I wanted to go on board the aircraft with it.

We are not talking about John Q. Citizen. We are not talking about some accountant or a school teacher going on board to do something stupid. Conceptually at least we are talking about terrorists who would hijack the plane or do something incredibly disruptive on board. Do they need an inch and a half long nail file, especially given the training that many of them have? If they take an ordinary wooden lead pencil and hold it so the eraser part is in the palm of their hand and the rest of the pencil protrudes between their second and third fingers, that is infinitely more dangerous and more deadly than a sharpened stiletto in our hands. Yet they do nothing about that.

Let us talk about an ordinary credit card. A person can actually hone the edge of a plastic credit card to the point where it is as sharp as a knife. Speaking of knives, they make composite material knives, special hard plastics, that one could actually strap to one's leg and go through security. It will not set off any alarms because it is not metal. It will not be found in the X-ray machine because a person's leg does not go through. Yet it ends up on board in the hands of someone who is trained to use that type of thing.

That is the facade we are going through and nothing will change that. There are totally different ways of dealing with it. Many suggestions have been made, including something that is politically incorrect but nonetheless effective. Something like profiling is very open to criticism but it is effective. The Israelis have had one hijacking. They are a target, yet they have had one hijacking. That is the method they use. What we are doing is completely ineffective.

The carpet cutters that were taken on board were not snuck on board. They were taken on board because they were allowed. Now we do not allow carpet cutters but we still allow pencils and credit cards. The airlines still give out steel forks and regular glasses on board the plane. There are wine bottles, liquor bottles, all these things. Even things like a shoelace in the hands of a highly trained person is a deadly weapon. We have to be realistic about the incredible amount of money we spend and what it is supposed to do.

To put it in a more specific manner as to how we can save money in a lot of these airports, I go back to the example at Castlegar.

First, let me talk about the major airports. The major airports now have what the government calls enhanced security. More people have been hired and given training. Bigger and better X-ray machines are being put in and there is talk about putting in CAT scans. There are explosives sniffers and all kinds of things. Supposedly this is pretty effective.

Then we go to small communities like in my area: Cranbrook, Castlegar, Penticton. We do not even have basic X-ray machines. We have some very conscientious people who check hand luggage and make passengers walk through metal detectors. For all their training, it is incredibly easy to conceal things for those who would do that type of thing. Obviously it is easier to get something through there than it is when one gets to a big airport and it is run through a CAT scan.

However once people go through that and they get on board the plane, that plane flies around all that fancy enhanced security and deposits them on the secure side of the airport. All the money being spent to put this stuff into the major airports is for naught because we let people get on at the least secure airport and fly them around them.

How can the government save money? Places like Castlegar, Cranbrook and Penticton have Dash 8 service. Anyone can charter a Dash 8. It is not a big deal. They do not even use the terminal. They get on the plane and fly to whatever place that plane has been chartered. Why would people worry about getting on board a Dash 8 to hijack it? They can lease the plane and take it wherever they want?

I suggest the government look at doing away with airport security in the small airports that only have small turbo prop service. It should let people get on board in those places and not worry about checking. When passengers fly into places like Vancouver or Calgary or other places, the passengers should simply be unloaded into the general part of the airport so they do not go into the secure side. If they are only flying from Castlegar to Vancouver on a business trip, they are on their way, no hassle and no cost. If they are connecting to other places or flying overseas, they should go through this enhanced security. There is some logic at least to that.

It is still essentially ineffective for someone who is determined enough but at least there is some rationale behind that and at least we have eliminated the cost of security in a lot of airports where there really is no justification for it. The old adage for this one is “a chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It is a phenomenal waste of taxpayer money to put a CAT scan in Vancouver and one in Castlegar then fly them around the CAT scan in Vancouver having gone through in Castlegar.

Clause 116 would require every airport authority to display the Canadian flag in the terminal and in any other place to which the public has access. I like to see the Canadian flag as much as anyone. The people are arriving in Canada. The minister has suggested that these would be at airports that have international travel. I would suggest that it is probably already there. However if the government wants to formalize it I think it is going way over the top in terms of the bill. Beyond that, it would require that signs be erected in prominent locations around the airport and in every terminal building proclaiming that the airport is owned by the Government of Canada.

The only possible reason for doing that would be to fool travellers into believing that the new terminal, built with airport improvement fees, was somehow provided by the government. It is a deception at best and a fraudulent misrepresentation at worst.

Let us say that we own a business. We rent a building and make all kinds of development improvements to the building because we have an expansive operation. Why on earth would we put up signs proclaiming that the building and all the wonderful things belong to somebody else? It does not happen.

Why should these airport authorities put up prominent advertising saying that the building they are leasing happens to belong to the Government of Canada, especially in buildings such as the new terminal building that will be opened next spring in Ottawa which does not have 5¢ of federal money? Yes, it belongs to the federal government, and what a sweetheart deal that is, but not 5¢ was put in. In fact, a huge amount of money was extracted from the very people who paid to put that building up.

Clause 57 would limit an airport authority's ability to invest in another corporation, limiting it to 2% of gross revenues per year. This effectively would kill off Vancouver airport's very profitable YVR airport services by severely restricting its ability to finance projects in places such as Chile, Jamaica and Hamilton. The profits from these projects come back to be utilized by this non-profit authority and reduce the overall costs of airport operations.

The airport authority is made up of business people and the government is the last entity in the country that should be giving the private sector rules and advice on how to make a profit.

Going back to the example of Edmonton, here is an airport like all the rest on which the federal government lost money. The Winnipeg airport authority has made a tremendous number of improvements to its airport at no cost to the government. Its reward was, first of all, being hit with $900,000 a year in rent, and, if that is not bad enough, since 1997 its rent has been increased many times and will be $7 million in 2007.

Another thing that is significantly absent in the bill are rules regarding airport improvement fee money collected by the airlines on behalf of airports. This is curious given that the government has already recognized the need to protect its own money in the name of the air traveller's security charge currently being collected by airlines. The airlines are required to hold that money in trust separate from general revenues.

All funds collected by the airlines on behalf of others should be held in trust. It should not become part of the individual airline's revenue and then some other charge come out at some other point. If it is collected by the airline on behalf of someone else then it should be held separate.

As of April 4 Air Canada, which is, as we know, in a lot of trouble these days, owes Canada's largest airports many millions of dollars for airport improvement fees collected. That money is now tied up in Air Canada's bankruptcy protection hearings.

When we talk about small airports, as I have with my home airport of Castlegar, it does not take a lot of funds that were budgeted for and counted on by that community to run into serious trouble if they suddenly find that they are not getting paid those fees.

I would like to talk in general terms about the fact that the bill has too many errors and omissions for the aviation public to deal with. There are always a few things in a bill that someone will not like or a few things that should be in it but are not. That is what makes up Bill C-27. A vast majority of the things in the bill should not be in it or should at least be better modified. If the government were truly responsible a lot of things would be in the bill but unfortunately they are not. Committees should be tasked with fine-tuning bills, not doing major overhauls.

I want to touch on a few things the parliamentary secretary to the minister said. He said that the government was building on the 1994 airport program it introduced and that this was new international airport policy that was building on this and doing things well. One would think that when it takes nine years to put something together it would be put together a lot better than the government has done with this. There are so many problems in the legislation that it is absolutely absurd.

The parliamentary secretary spoke about monitoring and promoting good corporate policy and yet the government does not have any concept of good corporate policy. Everything it does is either touched with corruption, like the former minister of public works and government services, or it is corrupted with absolute financial irresponsibility, like the former minister of justice who came before Parliament with a bill that he said would cost $2 million and now has cost $1 billion. While all of this was going on, the government knew of the horrendous cost overruns and it covered them up. This is the organization that will monitor and promote good corporate policy for the private sector, not for profit airport authorities. That is pretty absurd.

The parliamentary secretary also talked about better transparency and public reporting. Why does the government not start over there on that side? It is curious to hear the government saying that it has to watch this organization to make sure it is held accountable, that it is absolutely transparent in its operations and that it holds public meetings to allow the public see exactly what is happening. Where was this idea when the government ran up a bill of $1 billion with Bill C-68, the Firearms Registration Act, which was supposed to cost $2 million? Why does the government not start with those kinds of policies and then maybe we can consider that it has some credibility to start talking about accountability from others?

Let me talk about the charging principles for airport improvement. The government wants to have mandatory consultations with the users and a lot of control to make sure nobody is overcharged. I again remind members of the example of the Winnipeg airport where $900,000, almost $1 million a year to start, from something that it used to lose money on, accelerating to $7 million a year by the year 2007, while that airport authority continues to build up that airport and make it better than it was when it took it over from Transport Canada.

The public bid solicitation is also something in the bill.

I see I am almost out of time so I will conclude by saying that I am concerned that none of the recommendations from committee dealing with security fees, airport rents and reduction of aviation fuel taxes have been addressed by the government. I therefore would move that the motion be amended by replacing all the words after the word “that” with “this House declines to give second reading to Bill C-27, an act to amend the Criminal Code and other acts, since the bill fails to address the recommendations in the first report of the Standing Committee on Transport, air travel security charge, tabled on December 12, 2002”.

[Marcel Proulx, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-27, the Canada airports act, introduced in the House on March 20. It is part of the vision for our transportation system policy framework embodied in “Straight Ahead - A Vision for Transportation in Canada” that was released in February by the Minister of Transport.

The Canada airports act would be part of moving this vision forward and would guide the continued development of a sustainable airport system. This is a piece of legislation that has been developed for the longer term. Its purpose is not to address the short term challenges facing the entire air industry sector at this time.

These more immediate concerns have the full attention of the government. Let me assure the House that the government is actively monitoring the current situation in the airline industry. As we all know, the air industry is facing challenges, such as the SARS health issue, the war in Iraq, and fluctuating fuel costs.

The government remains fully committed in reviewing its policy on rents collected at the airports that it leases. The minister hopes to be able to announce shortly the direction the government intends to take on this matter.

The Canada airports act would provide a legislated economic policy framework for the only part of our transportation infrastructure that is lacking one, namely airports. Canada's transportation policy has evolved over the years in response to changing times and conditions. Today, we need to modernize and reform Canada's airports policy by enshrining some key obligations and governance principles in legislation. In doing so, we are contributing to the governance agenda as set out in the most recent Speech from the Throne.

The act responds in a positive manner to the recommendations in the government mandated local airport authority review report of 1999 and the Auditor General's report of October 2000. It conveys the governance response to the recommendations on airport governance in the Canada Transportation Act review panel report and in the final report of the independent observer on airline restructuring.

It reflects comprehensive consultations with the affected airport operators, air carriers and provincial and territorial governments.

The Canada airports act is intended to build on the successes of the 1994 airport commercialization policy, while addressing new and emerging issues that have arisen, with 10 years experience since that policy was announced.

The bill contains a new declaration for a national airports policy that replaces the 1994 policy which was primarily divestiture oriented. This declaration is very much in line with the new transportation policy statement set out in Bill C-26, the transportation amendment act, introduced in the House on February 25.

The declaration recognizes that it is in the public interest to have a national system of airports that is operated in a manner that is safe, secure, efficient, economically sustainable, transparent and environmentally responsible. The new policy also articulates the requirement to provide facilities and services to air carriers in an effective, pro-competitive manner and to provide opportunities for air carriers and passengers to express their views on key airport development issues and fees.

The policy recognizes local and regional interests through the activities and governance structures of airport authorities, as well as the role airports play in linking the air transportation system to other modes of transportation and linking the communities they serve to the rest of the world.

The new national airports policy declaration will guide airports in how they must implement the requirements of the act.

Upon passage, the Canada airports act will apply to 29 airports that account for 95% of the traffic of all scheduled passenger and cargo traffic in Canada. This includes the 26 airports identified in 1994 as comprising the national airports system and other airports of national significance due to their strategic geographic location, continued federal residual ownership or because they serve more than 200,000 passengers annually.

The bill contains the key elements that constitute an economic policy framework to strengthen the governance, transparency and accountability of these airports.

I will say a few words on each of these.

Let me start with the government's role and powers. The government's key role is to protect the public interest as it relates to airports, namely, monitoring the airport system and making policies to promote the integrity and long term sustainability, protecting federal property and promoting good corporate governance.

The Government of Canada will be granted the power to give directions and create regulations, for example, in the provision of equitable access for air carriers to airport facilities such as gates, bridges and counters, slot coordination, federal visibility and environmental requirements. The Government of Canada will also be given emergency powers to remedy extraordinary disruptions similar to what is provided in the Canada Transportation Act.

As for the roles and obligations of all affected airport operators, there will be a requirement for them to provide information to the Minister of Transport in support of carrying out his role of overseer, policy-maker, landlord and regulator.

Operators will also have to develop a pro-competitive, equitable access policy for airlines wanting to use essential airport facilities and services, and to post information on fees.

Airports will also have to give access to state and military aircraft, and airports with international traffic will have to ensure visibility of symbols of Canada.

All will have to help Canada meet its international obligations including trade commitments, for example, obligations under bilateral agreements with other countries.

Turning to disclosure and accountability, the focus of the act is on higher transparency through public reporting. There is a more limited application to the airports in the territorial capitals and airports not operated by authorities. However all affected airport operators will have to produce annual reports with audited financial statements and hold annual meetings that are open to the public.

In the case of airport authorities, the requirements are spelled out in greater detail and include those respecting financial information on investments in subsidiary and minority interest corporations. They include the requirement for an independent, comprehensive performance review to be conducted every five years from the date of transfer. To increase transparency, authorities will have to have all their key documents available for public review including their leases and performance review reports.

Perhaps one of the most important subjects covered in Bill C-27 relates to airport fees. Although notice requirements are covered in our leases, this bill would establish a more formal fee setting process respecting aeronautical fees and passenger fees of general application.

The bill sets out the charging principles and requires that a methodology for determining fees be developed that will make it clearer how they meet financial needs. It establishes a procedure for notices of fee adjustments and obligatory consultations with concerned parties.

The bill makes provision for appeals to the Canadian Transportation Agency in cases of alleged non-compliance with these procedures or with charging principles.

The proposed bill includes rules on the use of airport improvement fees, AIFs, collected from passengers. AIFs can only be charged in support of capital projects and those projects must be identified. Smaller airports, with traffic of less than 400,000 passengers, are permitted to use passenger fees to cover operating costs and they must also be disclosed.

I would like to explain some of the elements specific only to airport authorities, those related to their corporate structure and governance regime.

Unlike the port authorities that were continued under the Canada Marine Act of 1997, airports were divested without the benefit of a specific legislative framework. All but three airport authorities were incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, part II, as for not for profit entities.

We have now determined that it is more appropriate for the airport authorities operating leased airports of national significance to be incorporated under their own legislation. Consequently, all the airport authorities will be continued under the act. This means that instead of 21 different statements of purpose, the airport authorities will have a single, simplified statement that applies equally to all of them. Initially this will affect 18 airport authorities. This will be accomplished without any requirements other than to amend their bylaws to comply with the act.

The rights of the airport authorities will be preserved and they will continue as not for profit entities without share capital that are not agents of the Crown. The airport authorities will have the power to engage in activities defined as essential and complimentary activities of the airport and to create subsidiaries within investment limits.

Bill C-27 would also establish the framework for a more uniform corporate governance regime for authorities that updates and strengthens what we have now.

Nothing can replace a solid regime of governance and transparency for airports of national significance that provide an essential public service. The regime will be based on elements such as the structure of boards of directors, the necessary skills, the rules of eligibility for directors and rules regarding conflicts of interest.

All airport authorities will be subject to the same requirements regarding the make-up of boards of directors, with the possibility of choosing directors based on local factors in the region where the airport is located.

The bill spells out the types of organizations that can become selecting bodies that appoint or nominate directors as well as the processes for nominations and appointments of directors. These bodies include the federal government, the provinces, the regional authorities and municipalities and five categories of non-governmental entities, including the Air Carrier Industry Association. This uniform yet flexible regime is designed to ensure that no single entity controls the board and that persons with all the necessary skills are identified.

The proposed bill sets out in detail the duties of the boards of directors and will require them to have a governance committee and an audit committee. In addition, there are rules on auditor selection and rotation, on public bid solicitation and mandated consultation with air carriers and the community. As well the airport authority obligations respecting compliance with the Official Languages Act have been transferred without change.

We believe that with this bill we have struck a balance between the freedoms that airport authorities have and the need for increased accountability. We also believe that we have struck a balance between the wish of air carriers to have their say in the decisions of the authorities, and the independence of said authorities.

There are pro-competitive provisions to assist the airlines and the airports in their decisions on access to essential airport facilities such as slots, gates, bridges and the like. We believe these are measures that will contribute to ensuring the viability of air carriers. How communities can relate to their airports is made much clearer.

Many of these obligations are already in some form in our leases with the authorities, but we have done more. We have offered to provide advice on how to be compliant with the act to any airport that asks. Members should know that some airport authorities have already begun to put in place transitional measures to bring themselves into compliance more quickly.

The bill is a significant piece of legislation which I know has been anticipated by members. The Minister of Transport looks forward to the debate on its contents and to discussing it in detail in standing committees.

[Jane Stewart, Liberal, for the Minister of Transport]

moved that Bill C-27, an act respecting airport authorities and other airport operators and amending other acts, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[David Collenette, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-27, an act respecting airport authorities and other airport operators and amending other acts.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

Solicitation Laws

[Sophia Leung, Liberal, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to address private member's Motion No. 192 proposing the establishment of a special committee of the House to review the solicitation laws. The committee's overall goal would be to improve the safety of sex trade workers and the community and to recommend changes that would reduce the exploitation of and violence against sex trade workers.

I congratulate the hon. member for Vancouver East for moving this motion. Through this initiative, I want to address public concerns around prostitution related activities and the concerns in the community.

Over the years, in partnership with provincial and territorial governments, the federal government has undertaken various initiatives to address the issues linked to prostitution, the safety of sex trade workers and the reduction of harm to communities. Today in supporting this motion, I will support some of those initiatives and support the establishment of a committee of the House which could help in addressing prostitution related issues.

In 1997 the government passed Bill C-27 which amended the Criminal Code to create the new offence of aggravated procuring. The intent of the amendment was to facilitate the use of police decoys so that authorities could apprehend the clients of prostitutes under the age of 18. This amendment also made available special protections to young persons who testified against their exploiters, for example, through the use of a screen, closed-circuit television or videotaped evidence.

The Department of Justice has also supported a number of initiatives related to crime prevention and community based projects, particularly through phase two of the national strategy on community safety and crime prevention. This entailed a $32 million commitment each year to a program for safer communities.

For example, one initiative was the production of Stolen Lives: Children in the Sex Trade . This video documents the difficult lives of young sex trade workers in Vancouver and Calgary. Another example is the department's funding of close to half a million dollars to Victoria's Capital Region Action Team to address problems linked to youth prostitution in that area.

More recently in October 2002, Canada acceded to the optional protocol to the United Nations convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, or CEDAW. Canada has supported this UN convention since it was ratified in 1981.

In November 2000, along with the British Columbia child welfare services, Justice Canada co-hosted a national meeting of justice and child welfare officials. Action which has resulted from this meeting includes the establishment of a network of justice and child welfare officials to allow for the prompt sharing of information on all issues related to children and youth involved in prostitution.

The Department of Justice will continue to build on past achievements and to work with all its partners, including provincial, territorial and municipal government departments and agencies involved in justice related issues, social services and child welfare issues.

I therefore support this motion to establish a special committee of the House to review solicitation laws. We must find innovative ways to address the issues and deal with the problems. To do that we need discussion, brainstorming, strategizing and solutions. Our hope for achieving those things lies in establishing a committee of the House where representatives of people of every region of Canada could gather to serve the best interests of their constituents and communities.

In closing, let us work together with the hon. member for Vancouver East. I will support her initiative.

[Paul MacKlin, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to rise to speak on Motion No. 192. The motion proposes the creation of a special committee of the House “to review the solicitation laws”, that is, the criminal law regarding prostitution-related activities,“in order to improve the safety of sex-trade workers and communities overall, and to recommend changes that will reduce exploitation of and violence” done to sex trade workers.

First, I want to thank my hon. colleague from Vancouver East for having introduced the motion so that we can have this debate on what is clearly a very important issue. It is no secret that public concerns in the area of prostitution-related activities are growing with respect to the safety of the prostitutes and the harm caused to communities. It should also be noted that careful consideration of prostitution-related criminal law issues is important and is consistent with the government's commitment to vulnerable people, children included, and their protection.

I want to stress that the intent of the motion is admirable in that it tries to find a way to help a group of vulnerable persons and communities in our society that have consistently been marginalized, as the previous speaker indicated. However, I cannot emphasize enough that prostitution is a complex and multi-faceted problem. It must be addressed on many fronts, including legislative reform, community support, social interventions and other related issues.

In addition, the various impacts of prostitution on sex trade workers and on communities must be addressed in collaboration with a wide variety of partners, including other federal departments and agencies, provincial and territorial governments, particularly their departments responsible for dealing with justice-related issues and those responsible for social services and child welfare issues, and last but not least, municipal governments across the country.

Having said that, I wonder whether a special committee would be the best vehicle to elicit the collaboration of all these partners that must be involved in any attempt to address these issues. Clearly the cooperation of all these partners would be necessary to properly and usefully address all facets of prostitution-related issues.

I would like to take a few moments to give a somewhat brief and general outline of some of the government's past accomplishments and its ongoing work on this issue.

The Department of Justice has already undertaken various initiatives to address the issues linked to street prostitution, including the safety of sex trade workers and the reduction of harm to communities. For example, past legislative reform has included Bill C-27, in 1997, which amended the Criminal Code to create a new offence of aggravated procuring, to facilitate the use of police decoys for the apprehension of customers of prostitutes under the age of 18 and to make available special protections to young persons testifying against their exploiters, that is, such things as a screen, closed circuit television or videotaped evidence.

Another example of legislative reform is Bill C-51, in 1999, which amended the Criminal Code to extend the list of offences for which an authorization to intercept a private communication can be granted to include prostitution-related offences. This allows law enforcement to use electronic surveillance to investigate organized and telephone prostitution rings.

In relation to crime prevention and community-based projects, the Department of Justice has supported a number of initiatives, particularly throughout phase two of the national strategy on community safety and crime prevention, a $32 million per year program for safer communities. One initiative, for example, was the production of the “Stolen Lives” video, which documents the difficult lives of young sex trade workers in Vancouver and Calgary. Another example is the Department of Justice funding of some $489,000 to Victoria's Capital Region Action Team to address problems linked with youth prostitution in the Victoria area.

In the international arena, Canada has been involved in addressing the trafficking of women and children. For example, we have actively participated in the negotiation of the optional protocol to the convention on the rights of the child relating to the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in May 2000. Canada signed the optional protocol in November 2001.

As an example of working with our partners on this important issue, a federal-provincial-territorial working group on prostitution was established in 1992 by the federal-provincial-territorial deputy ministers of justice and reviewed legislation policy and practices concerning prostitution. It was co-chaired by the federal Department of Justice. Its final report was released in December 1998. It made recommendations on both legislation at the federal and provincial levels and on possible partnerships between government agencies. It underscored particularly the need for enhanced collaboration between justice and the child welfare systems.

As another concrete example of our partnerships in action, the federal Department of Justice co-hosted with the British Columbia child welfare services a national meeting of justice and child welfare officials in November 2000. Follow-up action to this national meeting has included the establishment of a network of justice and child welfare officials to allow for the prompt sharing of information on all issues related to children and youth involved in prostitution.

Additional follow-up action is overseen by the federal-provincial-territorial deputy ministers responsible for social services. Also, work is still being done, particularly to study issues and impacts relating to the possibility of decriminalizing street prostitution.

The Department of Justice will continue to build on past achievements and to work with its partners, including provincial, territorial and municipal governments and departments and agencies involved in justice related issues and in social services and child welfare issues.

Needless to say, this is a very complex matter and for all these reasons I support the intent of the motion in principle. However at this time I do not believe that a special committee of the House is the effective way for the development of recommendations and proposed changes to reduce the exploitation and violence done to sex trade workers.

Nuclear Safety and Control Act

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, let me first commend the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Louis on the wisdom of his comments today on Bill C-4, to amend the Nuclear Safety and Control Act.

I have had the pleasure and the honour of speaking on this bill for a total of 90 minutes. I have a little more to say. In light of the evidence presented by the government, there is a need to put more energy—not nuclear energy but something more common sense in nature—into this issue, and ask the government not to move any further into privatization by basically promoting private investment in the nuclear industry.

The fact that major financiers were not investing in the nuclear industry because they were indirectly liable for such a project shows that they knew it was risky. It is well known that financiers do not put their money into ventures that pose huge risks, the scope of which they do not know.

No one here can know the full impact of radioactive waste. During the previous session, we reviewed Bill C-27 on the management of nuclear fuel waste. We are well aware, because we examined the issue, that many countries have still not found the solution. I mentioned this yesterday in my speech. Some radioactive elements are present for periods as short as 550 years. That may seem very short in the history of a people or of humanity. However, other radioactive products remain present for 14 billion years, which is a much longer period.

As regards nuclear energy, we must question this form of energy, which is seen as a contributor to greenhouse gases. There is an inherent danger to the use of nuclear energy in terms of the world's safety, whether it is in the production of that energy, in the burial of radioactive waste, or even in the possibility that someone could get these products to make nuclear bombs.

I firmly believe that a debate should take place on whether or not to continue to develop nuclear energy. There are some rather striking examples. Take Germany, where 30% of the electrical energy was dependent on the nuclear sector. Germany is now announcing that it is dropping nuclear energy and that by the year 2050, it will have eliminated around 80% of its greenhouse gases. That country is ending the development of nuclear energy and, at the same time, it is able to commit to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by over 80% by the year 2050.

As we can see, these two objectives are not incompatible. This is what I am urging the government to do. It must go forward and begin a process to drop nuclear energy and its proliferation. This proliferation is being promoted by the bill, which tells major financiers “There is money to make in the short term in the nuclear energy sector, with no long term responsibilities anymore”.

We know full well that large multinationals, whose only objective is to make money, can easily invest in the nuclear energy sector. Should a catastrophic environmental disaster occur, they will just withdraw and their responsibility will be limited. They will not go any further. They will have made their money when it was easy. When there are responsibilities to be assumed, who will assume them? Who will have to clean up all these contaminated sites? Again, indirectly, it will be the public, because this situation will always occur.

In environmental matters, the government is always the one responsible for decontaminating, for reassuring the public and for ensuring that we have a healthy environment to live in. This is why it becomes more and more necessary not to involve the private sector in such important areas but to withdraw it from those sectors because it is not capable of assuming long-term responsibilities.

I think it is pretty clear that the government is not up to speed, particularly where alternate or renewable energy sources are concerned. It cannot therefore really want to invest in them.

Moreover, we are told that governments have invested over $15 billion in the nuclear sector. With opportunity costing, this represents indirectly over $161 billion invested in nuclear power.

Let us try to imagine the investments that could have been made in opportunity costs on renewable energies. There is nothing complicated about it: nuclear waste is with us just about forever, and is a risk to the entire population of the planet and the planet itself. There are, however, other important elements that are also equally eternal: the sun, the air, the water, the land. These are all elements with which we must work to obtain constantly renewable energy.

The Bloc Quebecois has raised this, has made predictions about the potential employment benefits of the wind energy industry. But to no avail, because the government wants to invest in nuclear energy.

This government has a fundamental problem when it comes to wind energy. There is, of course, always the exception that confirms the rule, and I again thank the hon. member for Lac-Saint-Louis for his speech. The government is still at the stage of wondering whether the windmills are turned by the wind, or create the wind. So if that is the stage they are at, there are a lot of serious questions to be asked.

I am therefore urging the House to put this bill on hold so that the public can have its say as to whether it wants nuclear energy or not. According to the latest surveys, the people of Canada and of Quebec are saying no to nuclear energy.

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I had the opportunity on two occasions to speak to the bill formerly known as Bill C-57, which is now Bill C-4. This means that I was able to speak to this bill for more than 80 minutes. Now we must discuss the amendment put forward by my colleague from Jonquière to hoist this bill.

The last time I spoke to Bill C-4, I could not even finish because there were too many arguments in favour of its withdrawal and particularly in favour of a broad debate on the nuclear industry.

Today we have only ten minutes to speak to the amendment, and I must tell the House that this whole debate about the privatization of the nuclear industry could be postponed to a certain extent. We know that the purpose of this amendment proposed by the government is essentially to eliminate barriers to the privatization of the nuclear industry.

We have never had real debates on whether we should continue to invest in the nuclear industry and continue to try to fix, at an extravagant cost, nuclear generating stations that are in bad shape.

Privatization makes it easier to re-open nuclear plants that were quite rightly shut down. It also opens the door to the costly development of nuclear energy in Canada. I will digress for a minute. Atomic Energy Canada is for all intents and purposes a government entity. We can already see the emerging conflict of interest.

Obviously, we must look at reducing nuclear waste. Last year, we debated Bill C-27, regarding the long-term management of nuclear fuel waste. We have compelling evidence that this waste may last for years, even thousands of years, and we do not know how to dispose of it properly. We do not know how to lessen the potential impact on the environment and human health.

Continued reliance on nuclear energy increases even further the risks of environmental accidents, not only those linked to nuclear waste, but also all sorts of other accidents that might occur. Cases in point are Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and others. We also have national and international security concerns due to potential terrorist acts as well as the use of nuclear reactors to make nuclear bombs.

Since 1997, when the Nuclear Safety and Control Act was drafted, section 46.3 of the act in some ways limited the possibility for businesses or financiers to invest in nuclear energy. People say it was a drafting mistake. However, neither during the debate nor in committee was that ever mentioned. It can be easily said—not claimed, but said—that at the time the government was trying to prevent the private sector from investing in a major way, to promote nuclear energy. At that time, there was no debate either on whether or not we should continue to invest in nuclear energy, much less about private investment.

In the world we live in in 2002, we realize that an increasing number of countries are getting out of nuclear energy. The majority of countries in western Europe that use nuclear energy, except for France, have decided to stop doing so mainly because of the lack of solutions for disposing of spent fuel containing 1% of plutonium; this is true too of states relying heavily on nuclear energy such as Belgium where the percentage is 50% and Germany where it is 30%.

Promoters of nuclear energy often say that this form of energy is the solution to the greenhouse gas issue. We know that 30 per cent of Germany's energy used to come from the nuclear industry. Today, by terminating its nuclear program and its investments in the nuclear sector, Germany will have reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. This is a high figure, considering that Germany will have been able to do this even without 30 per cent of the energy it used to get from the nuclear sector.

It is totally false to say that the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is closely linked to the use of nuclear energy. As I have already said, nuclear energy brings its own long-term and very long-term problems. I will give a few examples.

Carbon 14 is a radioelement which can remain radioactive for as long as 5,500 years. Mr. Speaker, you will no longer be there to verify that carbon 14 is no longer radioactive. I can even tell you that you will no longer be there to see those thorium 232 elements which can remain radioactive for 14 billion years.

In 1997, no attention was given to whether or not to continue with nuclear energy. Now there is, but obviously they had refused to allow the private sector to invest in nuclear energy. Today, people are increasingly withdrawing from this sector. There were some pressures at that time, mainly from members of the public who refused to allow the transportation of plutonium, of MOX, through their communities. In addition, in Canada, the Seaborn report also pointed out the vigorous opposition of the general population to the burial of radioactive waste. If the population is opposed to the burial of nuclear waste, we should not support the passage of legislation promoting the financing and development of nuclear plants in Canada. These plants would produce even more nuclear waste, which could be expected to generate even more opposition among the public.

In light of what is happening today in all European countries, Canada should finally take a stand, once and for all, on the development of nuclear energy. We have learned recently that even the Swiss, much of whose electricity needs are met by nuclear plants, are going to make a decision on their nuclear program. Right now, Switzerland is the third most nuclear energy dependent country in the world, after Lithuania and France, with 40% of its electricity coming from nuclear plants. The Swiss will soon have a referendum to decide whether to maintain the existing moratorium or phase out nuclear energy by gradually closing down their five nuclear plants by 2014.

Today, we have before us a motion that this bill be postponed indefinitely, and that emphasis be placed on priority action. We should hold a comprehensive debate and consult the general public and organizations promoting renewable energies.

We realize more and more that renewable energies are here to stay. This industry creates thousands of jobs. For the same amount of energy production, it creates many more jobs than the nuclear industry. Wind energy can create many more jobs.

Renewable energies tap resources that are almost indefinitely renewable, like the sun, wind, water and the biomass, as well as energy sources from the depths of the earth.

To conclude, I urge the government to withdraw this bill and to hold a comprehensive debate on the future of nuclear energy in Canada and on the investment we must make in renewable energies.

[Gerald Keddy, Progressive Conservative, South Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, before I make any comment or answer my colleague's question I want to congratulate him on becoming a grand-père. Hopefully the rest of us will get there at some stage in the process. One of the great privileges of standing in the House is that we do represent ourselves, our children and our children's children. The things we debate and discuss and the bills we pass should reflect that.

I would like my colleague to know that I am not forgetting Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or the dangers that are inherent in the nuclear sector. I am also not ignoring the very real fact that nuclear energy will continue to be part of our electricity supply in North America and indeed the world. In order to react to that fact we need to have, especially in Canada, legislation that reflects that.

There is another part of the legislation that is as problematic as how the legislation and the current clause 46(3) affect the lending institutions and the nuclear reactors. It also affects our research and development, our laboratories and our hospitals. Certainly no financial institution should be held responsible for nuclear waste or nuclear cleanup, if it is required, that it did not cause. I think that is the reason we would support the bill. However we also support open, full and complete debate on the legislation and intend to ensure that it is debated.

I appreciate my colleague's comments and the comments of the member for Sherbrooke who debated Bill C-27, the nuclear waste disposal act. We had unanimity among the opposition parties that it was a poorly crafted, poorly worded, typical, I might add, piece of Liberal legislation. Everyone in the House was against that legislation.

I separate this particular bill out differently. I think it affects the industry differently, and I certainly encourage and support debate on it, but at the end of the day we will support this particular clause.

[Gerald Keddy, Progressive Conservative, South Shore, NS]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to rise on the debate of Bill C-4 today. I listened fairly closely to the hon. member for Sherbrooke. He raised a number of very important issues about furthering this debate and making it broader. I encourage the hon. member to continue with that thought process because there is much more to be debated.

I agreed with the member on a number of issues, but quite frankly my Progressive Conservative colleagues and I disagree with him on a number of other issues. It was quite telling when he spoke about the future of nuclear energy. Although we are in agreement with how the government has ignored its responsibility to deal adequately with nuclear waste, certainly the future of nuclear energy will meet part of our energy commitments.

The hon. member for Sherbrooke quite rightly used Europe as an example. Although much of Europe is downsizing its nuclear sector, Germany has absolutely no compulsion about continuing to buy nuclear energy from France. With the German arrangement for getting rid of its reactors credits can be transferred between German reactors. Therefore Germany will continue to be a nuclear operator well into 2025 and 2030. In and of itself that does not set the case for nuclear energy, but it is part of the argument as it unfolds that should be laid out for people to discuss.

With the background of the bill there is a real sense of déjà vu, for my French colleagues. It seems to me that not long ago we were here debating this very bill. We had been lobbied by the banking institutions and the nuclear sector. At that time there was a great amount of urgency about this piece of legislation. It had to be passed within a certain timeframe.

There are a number of bills and I will mention just one of them: the Kimberley process for grading and marketing diamonds. That is another bill that has a great amount of urgency. We have to get it passed by December 31, 2002, because we have already signed a charter at the United Nations.

These two pieces of legislation are urgent. Both of them have a fair amount of importance. We need to get them passed. Yet the government prorogued the House. It said in the middle of September that the legislation was not important, that we did not have to come back here, that the nation's business could wait. It simply got rid of the legislation, the committees and the members who sit on the committees and said that it would set them all up again.

In the government's infinite wisdom I am sure there must have been a reason for that, but I do not know what it was. I am waiting to be enlightened. I expect that some time over the course of the next couple of weeks the government will enlighten us on the reason it prorogued the House. We had already debated this legislation in the House. It had already gone through committee. Why did it take this legislation and say “Forget it. It is not required. We do not have to worry about it. We will just start all over again”?

By the way, it now wants us to take the Kimberley process and fast track it. We are to forget about having a debate on it because it is not required. The government has a deadline so it will fast track it. If it cannot fast track it, it will just use its majority to force closure and get it passed. That is not democracy. Even the Liberals in their limited knowledge of how democracy works would understand that this is not democracy in any way, shape or form.

To speak directly to the bill, the government passed the Nuclear Safety and Control Act in 1997 but apparently, like all the rest of the legislation it has passed, it forgot to read the bill. Specifically it did not read the fine print.

We have subsection 46(3) of the act that was passed in 1997 by the government which has become problematic. When nuclear corporations asked for debt financing from the banks and the debt servicing people of the country they found that the banks did not want to provide it. When we read subsection 46(3) it is quite clear why they did not want to provide it. Subsection 46(3) reads:

(3) Where, after conducting a hearing, the Commission is satisfied that there is contamination referred to in subsection (1), the Commission may, in addition to filing a notice under subsection (2), order that the owner or occupant of, or any other person with a right to or interest in, the affected land or place take the prescribed measures to reduce the level of contamination.

Back in 1997 I do not think it was the intent of the government to put the responsibility for nuclear contamination cleanup on the backs of the financial institutions that would be supporting the said nuclear reactor or site. Certainly that is the way the banks looked at it. Under the old section of the act they had a liability that there was no reason they should assume.

I look at the debate about nuclear energy as a separate debate about the wording of this particularly sloppy piece of typical Liberal legislation. It is absolutely no surprise to me that we have to go back to fix legislation as we have done many times with many other pieces of legislation in the House that the Liberals had passed by forcing the issue, by preventing debate and by using their huge majority.

Today in Canada the CNSC licenses over 3,500 operations. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is responsible for 3,500 operations in Canada. We are not just talking about nuclear reactors. There is a handful of nuclear reactors in the country but there are 3,500 nuclear operations. These operations use nuclear energy or materials. They include uranium refineries, nuclear power plants, hundreds of laboratories and most hospitals.

If we look at section 46 of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act as it is currently written, we realize that the liability for contamination at any site extends not just to the owners, occupants and managers of that site but to lenders such as banks and other financial organizations.

When we read that, and if even we are against the principle of nuclear energy, we must realize this piece of legislation affects a lot more operations than just nuclear power plants.

I do not think many members of the House want to start shutting down our laboratories and our hospitals because of a mistake in a piece of legislation that was forced through the House in 1997 by another majority Liberal government.

If we look at the substance of the bill to amend section 46 of the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, the amendment changes the wording of section 46 to eliminate the liability of lending institutions for remedial measures in instances of nuclear contamination. There is still a liability for the operators, managers and owners, as there absolutely should be, but even in my wildest dreams I do not see an argument for liability on behalf of lending institutions.

I am not trying to say that somehow we should allow the big banks to run the country or not be applicable to the laws that govern the country, but in this case there is clearly no reason that it should apply to the financial institutions. Liability for any possible radioactive contamination would only apply to the owners, occupants and managers of the site that may be contaminated.

Under proposed section 46(3) that measure can be interpreted to extend beyond liability for nuclear site remediation as it is worded now. It should apply only to an owner, operator and manager of the site, not to the financial institution.

Hopefully it is not the job of government to stifle the nuclear sector or to prevent it from being a supplier of clean energy, which it is. We had unanimous consent in the House against Bill C-27 that was to deal with nuclear waste with which the government dealt in a very sloppy, ineffective, unorganized, unprincipled and totally arbitrary manner. All opposition parties in the House voted against Bill C-27.

To this very day the government has not dealt with the long term storage problems inherent in the nuclear energy sector. However, that does not mean we should not approve a small change in legislation that would allow nuclear operators, laboratories, hospitals and research facilities to access debt financing.

There are all kinds of reasons that I would tend to debate this issue. Did the government take its responsibility to the people of Canada seriously when it reintroduced the bill after it prorogued the House and threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater? I do not think the government took its responsibility seriously at all.

We could have been back here in the middle of September and we could have been moving on a lot of legislation, not the least of which is the Kimberley Process. Now we are hearing at the natural resources committee that somehow we may not have time to deal with the Kimberley process because it is October 10 and we need to have this done by December 31. We have known about it for some time but we have not dealt with it, so we will just shut down the diamond industry if we do not get it ready.

Canadian mines are producing 6% of the world's gemstones. With the Ekati mine coming on line we are expected to produce 12% of the world's gemstones. It is a huge market, a wonderful industry, a great opportunity for northern Canada, and we have a helmsman who is asleep at the wheel. His first mate jumped ship and the rest of the sailors are ready to mutiny at any minute.

Now we will throw out all the legislation, never mind what is or is not important, and we will rework it all. It is not a question of the Progressive Conservative Party supporting the legislation, we will support it, but we do not support the arrogant, indecisive, totally unorganized approach the government has to everything.

If the government makes a mistake today, it will worry about it some day. Some day down the line it will get it fixed. It did something in 1997 but it did not have the competency to craft legislation that would actually last more than five years before it had to be fixed again here in the House. Somehow or another it muddles along throwing out legislation and then bringing it back. In the meantime the important issues facing the country are put on the back burner.

By the way, now we have another burning issue, the Kimberley process, which is a great process. Because it is a natural resources issue, we might have to send it to the trade committee where it can be dealt with in a timely manner. It is not the opposition's problem and it is not the fault of the opposition parties in the House that the government cannot figure out how to run this institution.

We have spoken to this subject a number of times and, unfortunately, we will be speaking to it again. It was the result of poorly crafted legislation that was introduced in 1997. We have a responsibility as parliamentarians to fix the legislation. I intend to vote in support of fixing that legislation but I will not vote in support of stifling debate.

Because the government made the decision to prorogue the House and because it does not understand the basics of governing the nation, we will debate this issue as long as anyone cares to debate it, whether it be members from the Bloc, from the NDP, from the Alliance or from the Progressive Conservative Party. We have a responsibility to Canadians to examine all parts and aspects of this legislation, which we already did.

However, since the government said that we would have another opportunity, I feel as an opposition member of Parliament that we will take that opportunity and look at the legislation until it goes through all the hurdles and the whole process, to the Senate, is approved and comes back to the House again. That is not the fast track. That is not the easy way out for a government that denied its responsibility, decided to look the other way and prorogue the House of Commons for no foreseeable and observable reason.

[Serge Cardin, Bloc, Sherbrooke, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C-57, An Act to amend the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, is now back as Bill C-4. It had been introduced at first reading on Friday, May 31, 2002. It went to second reading the following Tuesday, June 4, 2001. I think we all agree that this was fast.

It now is one of the first ones to come back, which shows the government's eagerness to give in to the demands of the nuclear lobby.

Of course, it is not a very large bill. It even seems quite simple. However, if we take a closer look at it, some fundamental issues emerge. The bill is only five lines long. It contains only one short paragraph. Subsection 46(3) of the old act said:

Where, after conducting a hearing, the Commission is satisfied that there is contamination referred to in subsection (1), the Commission may, in addition to filing a notice under subsection (2), order that the owner or occupant of, or any other person with a right to or interest in, the affected land or place take the prescribed measures to reduce the level of contamination.

In the French version, the word “responsable” is being replaced by the word “occupant” , and in both versions the words “with a right to or interest in“ are being replaced by the words “who has the management and control of”.

In the French version, the terms “En outre, elle peut” refer to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. As can be seen, subsection 46(3) is amended as follows:

(3) Where, after conducting a hearing, the Commission is satisfied that there is contamination referred to in subsection (1), the Commission may, in addition to filing a notice under subsection (2), order that the owner or occupant of, or any other person who has the management and control of, the affected land or place take the prescribed measures to reduce the level of contamination.

We can all agree: this is quite simple. However, the government tells us that it is simply correcting an irregularity and that we should move on to other things as quickly as possible. That is the government's wish. However, it is a bit brief.

When we say it is a bit brief, it reminds me a bit of Cyrano de Bergerac, whom I will paraphrase if you will indulge me. We could say the following: “Oh no, young man, that is a bit brief. One could convey much to the gods just by varying one's tone of voice. There is curious: But what does this apparently inoffensive simplicity conceal? Timorous: There are therefore risks if financiers do not wish to commit themselves. Cavalier: Ah, that is a private matter. We should not concern ourselves with it. Interrogative: Can we do without nuclear energy? Affirmative: Nuclear energy is not a greenhouse gas solution. Provident and considerate: Invest in renewable energy; it will be to your advantage.

The arguments of the minister and the sponsor to justify this amendment are clumsy to say the least. They claim that it is merely a very minor technical correction to correct a mistake that was made when the legislation was passed in 1997. According to them, Hansard makes no mention of a discussion on this paragraph and they also claim that the legislator did not intend to make it so difficult to finance nuclear generating stations. These claims distort the reality, or dare I say, the truth.

In a message written to the government, Brian Armstrong, Bruce Power's general counsel and corporate secretary, describes the points that the government should take into consideration, and I quote:

Generally, the legislation has a negative impact on the capacity of private corporations to invest in nuclear plants, and this is detrimental to the future development of the Canadian nuclear industry.

This is all that was needed to launch the debate. There are two specific things in this statement, namely the privatization of nuclear plants and, more importantly, the anticipated development of that industry. I am convinced that this small clause in the bill did not go unnoticed.

In 1997, no one had stated any intention of privatizing nuclear plants. All the funding was provided by the provinces or by their crown corporations through the issuance of government backed bonds, and not through mortgages on nuclear plants. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the legislator acted the way it did. It acted in compliance with the strict rules that have always governed the nuclear industry.

Moreover, the whole argument overlooks the major negative developments in the nuclear industry since 1997, both in Canada and around the world. It is as if they wanted the House to begin this debate with a 1997 vision, that is without taking into account the evolution of the situation in recent years.

On the contrary, I think we are justified in addressing the issue in a 2002 context. We must put into perspective the changes that have occurred in that industry since 1997, and we must see if it is in the public interest to now promote not only the privatization of nuclear plants by eliminating these constraints, but also, as I said, the development of the nuclear industry.

Before briefly reviewing the major events which have occurred since 1997 and which serve as arguments against the nuclear development which the Ontario privatization effort is attempting to achieve, and before showing the increased environmental and safety risks which would result from this amendment, it is appropriate to examine the government's main arguments and to comment on them.

The government tells us that the nuclear industry is at a disadvantage, compared to other forms of energy. It is perfectly normal to treat the nuclear industry differently, since the scope of contamination following a nuclear plant incident is tremendous, both in terms of its geographical impact and the duration of its effects.

The explosion at Chernobyl contaminated the land all the way to the south of France and numerous cancers relating to this accident still surface every day and will continue to do so for decades to come. Therefore, it is normal to be much more demanding with the nuclear industry.

The government also tells us that this puts Canadian industries at a disadvantage compared to their international competitors. What industries? Nuclear power plant construction is totally under the control of the federal government, Atomic Energy of Canada being the sole Canadian supplier. As for the operation of these plants, it has been under the control of the provinces so far, and this standard also applies to a foreign private operator wanting to invest in a plant here. That foreign operator is treated the same way as any local private operator. The government also says that this was an exceptional measure.

When dealing with an industry that produces extremely hazardous waste that will remain hazardous for thousands of years, including plutonium and some other components which can be used and have been used to build mass destruction nuclear weapons and for which there exists no solution that would be safe in the long term, it is absolutely normal that such an industry be subjected to stricter rules than those that apply to an oil well or a hydroelectric dam.

The government also tells us that the general powers of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission are sufficient. In view of the commission's lack of independence, it is preferable to keep this specific power rather than rely solely on the regulatory power provided under section 24 of the act.

I should point out that this commission did not exist in 1997. Until 2000, it was the former Atomic Energy Control Board. As was the case with members of the old board, members of this commission are appointed by the government, which also owns Atomic Energy of Canada and has an obvious business interest in the development of the nuclear industry.

This explains why it has never refused or withdrawn a nuclear generating station licence, despite the many dangerous incidents that occur on a regular basis. It took a report from American consultants, in 1998, to convince Ontario to close half of its reactors, which had become too dangerous after just some twenty years in operation.

Let us look at the important events that have occurred in the nuclear industry since 1997. I say 1997 because that is the year the Nuclear Safety and Control Act was reworked and amended. Subsection 46(3), which the bill seeks to amend, dates back to that time. However, we must look at what has been happening in the meantime to determine if it is still appropriate to privatize and expand the nuclear industry.

First, in 1998 Ontario had to shut down half of its reactors, resulting in a $10 billion loss for Ontario Hydro, which now had a negative net worth and had to restructure. The utility was divided into three, leaving behind a huge debt for taxpayers.

The shutdown was due to the premature aging of the equipment and the inability of the staff to manage an environment that had become difficult and dangerous.

In Canada, we also had the publication of the Seaborn report. Here, as everywhere else in the western world, the commission found, after a ten-year study, that the proposed solution to bury spent fuel was strongly opposed by the general public and that there was no other long-term solution.

To avoid having to shut down plants whose cooling pools were full to capacity, the number of temporary on-site dry storage facilities was therefore increased.

Moreover, no new plant has been built in Canada over the past 20 years, none is planned for the next several decades and none of the plants shut down in 1998 has yet been able to re-open.

The only plant in New Brunswick, which is now 20 years old, is showing signs of premature aging, and over the past 24 months it has had to be shut down on several occasions for prolonged periods of time. According to an ongoing preliminary study, it would take over $850 million to extend its life past 2006, if it lasts that long, which is doubtful.

In Quebec, an identical plant, Gentilly-2, will be 20 years old next year, and the recent increase in the number of reportable problems seems to indicate that it too will have to be shut down earlier than planned.

When it is possible to obtain 800 megawatts for $500 million by constructing a new natural gas fired plant, which is not excessively polluting—I am not promoting natural gas, but speaking against nuclear generating stations—it would be surprising to see $850 million invested in renovating, without any guarantee, an old 675 megawatt nuclear lemon generating 2.3 tonnes of irradiated fuel weekly, without any long term solutions for disposal of that spent fuel.

What is more, as far as events in Canada are concerned, the bad reputation of this industry has put young people off, and as a result, nuclear plants are having difficulty finding replacements for their highly skilled staff.

In the meantime, between 1997 and the present, certain events have taken place in other countries. Most of the countries of western Europe that use nuclear power, with the exception of France, have decided to end the experiment, particularly because of the lack of solutions for disposing of spent fuel, with its 1% plutonium content. This is even the case for heavily nuclear-dependent states such as Belgium, which is 50% dependent, and Germany, which is 30% dependent.

Most of the pressure has come from the public, which refused to allow plutonium shipments to pass through their towns and villages on the way to or from MOX processing sites. They cannot be faulted for this, when we know that a single microgram of this substance can kill in a very short time, if inhaled.

There is one other point. Canada has been unsuccessful in all of its attempts to market Candu to other countries since the China contract. After a long process, Turkey has deferred for another 30 plus years its decision on the advisability of using atomic energy. As for Korea, having had a lot of problems with its Candu, it has decided not to use Canada to supply its needs in future.

Atomic Energy of Canada therefore needs to convert to the service sector, since it does not have a single contract for new power plants. Even the completion of the long-suspended Rumanian plant, which has been on hold for years due to lack of funds, has not yet been approved, and private funding is no more easily obtained.

Still looking beyond our borders, moreover, an accident in 1999 in a Japanese reprocessing centre under construction shook up the entire world nuclear industry and forced it to re-examine its standards and risk assessments relating to this technology. This accident, following the Chernobyl disaster, was the catalyst for a number of countries going off nuclear power.

Even highly nuclear dependent Japan has re-examined its investments. As for France, it halted operations in its breeder reactor, since these were unjustified in a shrinking market context, which ought to lead in the medium term to reprocessing plants, and possibly the nuclear plants themselves, being closed down.

There is one final point in regard to the events in other countries. No new plants have been built in the United States since Three Mile Island, in 1979. The state of Nevada used its veto to stop the planned construction of the only disposal site for millions of tons of spent fuel in the United States. This site was supposed to be built in the Yucca Mountains, approximately 80 miles from Las Vegas. A vote was pushed through Congress in an attempt to go ahead with the project, which has already cost $8 billion for technical studies alone.

A protracted legal battle can therefore be expected in order to prevent any new plants, which President Bush dearly wants, from reaching the drawing board before the end of his term. No one wants to invest in this technology as long as there is no long-term solution for disposing of the spent fuel. This fourth point is the second last one. I have one final point left.

The disappearance of the U.S.S.R., the rise in terrorism, and more recently, the conflict between India and Pakistan have highlighted the grave dangers of nuclear proliferation, both in terms of states capable of producing and launching arms of mass destruction, and small groups that are able to explode dirty bombs made up of conventional explosives and highly radioactive nuclear waste right in the middle of our cities.

Obviously, this was the situation that existed from 1997-2000, which leads us to wonder why the government has taken a position that favours the private sector and places even greater emphasis on the development of nuclear energy.

There are also environmental and safety risks with the nuclear industry. Ontario decided to hand over the ownership and management of a nuclear generating station that is currently closed, to a private company, to the qualified staff of a foreign company, in order to avoid having to make the major investments required before it could be re-opened, because staffing deficiencies were a determining factor in the forced closure of 1998.

In terms of environmental risks, obviously in the event of a major contamination that would bankrupt the local subsidiary, a mortgage lender that had the benefit of a guarantee from the foreign head office in addition to the mortgage guarantee, would exercise the former rather than seize the property, as many businesses often do, which would make it liable for any damage to the environment. In such cases, the head office would cut loose its subsidiary and nobody would be take responsibility for the contaminated site.

There are also security risks. Again, it is clear that putting the private sector in charge of any part of the operation or decontamination of sites containing nuclear material increases the risk of nuclear proliferation through the infiltration of individuals working for terrorist states or cells.

That is why, since 1980, the United States has prohibited the private reprocessing of any nuclear matter within its jurisdiction to prevent even the smallest amount of plutonium from finding its way into the hands of individuals over whom it has absolutely no control.

Regarding plutonium, let me give a quick example to illustrate the situation to our listeners. The size of the piece of paper I just crumpled corresponds to the amount of plutonium that was used in the Hiroshima bombing.

The proposed change to subsection 46(3) will encourage the development of nuclear energy in Canada. Privatization will make it easier to reopen plants that were closed down in Ontario and will increase environmental and security risks.

Because it is contrary to Bloc Quebecois policy to promote the development of nuclear energy, because there is practically a global consensus about moving away from nuclear energy, and because the dangers of proliferation have been abundantly illustrated by recent events on the international scene, we must oppose this amendment, and take this opportunity to promote a broader debate on the relevance of privatization and indeed of this whole foray into nuclear energy.

One objective of the Bloc Quebecois is to initiate a debate in which I think people would be very keen to participate. I have been hearing comments about this debate, and will share a few. Someone said “I will not agree to having future generations foot our nuclear energy bill and pay for our squandering”.

True, there is no such thing as “the rights of the human of the future”. Even the rights of the child are not yet a fait accompli. This does not concern all the lobbies that care only about immediate profit, and do not care about what happens tomorrow, let alone in the distant future.

The nuclear waste issue has yet to be resolved. It will probably never be resolved at a reasonable cost. Meanwhile, the nuclear lobby has opted for site storage, or perhaps underground storage, leaving our children's children with the burden of managing it for centuries to come.

Other comments foster debate or show the need for debate.

Some people have said that the civilian nuclear industry, an offspring of the military nuclear industry, was established without debate. The public, the only beneficiary of this huge source of energy, was not consulted. A true debate was never held. Decisions were always imposed upon the public.

Others have said that nuclear energy is not unavoidable and, most of all, should be thoroughly debated to evaluate its pros and cons; this debate is clearly needed in order to avoid an impasse.

Others also say that nuclear energy has beneficial as well as damaging effects and wonder whether we should consider only its benefits, namely power, and forget its damaging effects, hazards and waste.

We need to ask this critical question: should we, yes or no, drop nuclear energy? As matters now stand, the government has decided to go ahead by privatizing, thus indirectly acquiring the tools needed to develop the nuclear sector. Meanwhile, the fundamental question remains unanswered, and people were never consulted nor informed in a manner that would allow them to take a position on the issue.

I really hope that this short provision of five lines or so will bring about a true debate on the future of the nuclear industry as soon as possible.

Nuclear industry experts define the nuclear energy in three words: hazards, waste and costs. In short, this is what nuclear energy is about. How, then, can we honestly avoid the fundamental debate and promote the development of nuclear energy only because we are in favour of privatization? To my knowledge, there is no one in the private sector who will invest money if there are no profits to be made. And yet, development is often the only road to profits.

If we want to get into the debate, we have to consider hazards, waste and costs.

Let us talk about hazards. The protection of the public and of the environment against atomic radiation hazards generated by nuclear power plants is already a hazard linked with nuclear energy, as defined in dictionaries.

We know that a tremendous media campaign is being conducted tto make the public feel guilty about being concerned. The underlying message is always “If you are worried about nuclear energy, it is because you are stupid and incompetent”. It is urgent to stop making the public feel guilty. Its concerns are perfectly rational. In most forums—but that does not necessarily make it a societal debate—whether on the radio or elsewhere, people and scientists who believe in nuclear energy tend to put down those who have legitimate concerns.

The danger or hazard linked with nuclear energy comes from the very large amount of energy released by nuclear fission and the existence of a chain reaction, which create the risk of an uncontrollable exponential runaway. The radioactivity of the spent materials is released.

The threat posed by nuclear energy is related to several factors. It is often due to operating errors and material deficiencies. Indeed, in nuclear plants, many accidents are caused by operating errors, acts of sabotage, or equipment failure.

The more complex the technology, the more the human factor becomes a key factor. As I explained earlier, because of the bad reputation of nuclear energy, young people who would have the skills, the intelligence and the brain to work in this industry are turning away from it in increasing numbers. The government says that this is yet another reason to privatize the nuclear industry and, perhaps, to hire human resources abroad.

Earlier, I briefly mentioned that it is also for reasons of competitiveness and profitability that the safety aspect is being eroded. It has been said that nuclear plants are getting old. We are told that the costs of renovating and upgrading them are huge. In a strictly private environment where profitability is the number one priority, we have every reason to voice serious concerns.

To ensure a competitive production cost per kilowatt-hour, the operating life of plants is being unduly extended, the downtime of reactors is, perhaps, imprudently reduced and there is also increasing reliance on middlemen. We know that nuclear plants were originally expected to have an average operating life of 25 years. Now, they are talking about extending it to 40 years or more. However, equipment failure is often age-related.

Disasters could very well happen. Who is responsible when disasters occur? The House will remember that, in 1957, the United States congress passed the Price-Anderson Act limiting the civil liability of nuclear operators in the event of a nuclear accident. Such a limit was considered a precedent in civil liability.

Members will also remember than on July 29, 16 European countries signed the Paris convention setting forth the strict liability and the exclusive liability, but also the limitation upon the liability in the event of a serious nuclear accident. Pursuant to the agreement, measures are taken to avoid any interference with the development of the production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Limited liability would help the nuclear energy industry avoid major financial setbacks caused by a nuclear accident. Since exclusive liability applies only to the operator, it protects subcontractors and building companies against any hidden flaws in the construction of the facilities.

This is strikingly similar to the attempt by the government to exempt from reducing the level of contamination anyone who could be linked to such a risky but potentially very lucrative business, if no accident happens. Then, if something bad occurs, the financial security they provide, hence their liability, would be limited.

Later on, in France, the legislation passed on October 30, 1968 set out the terms and conditions of the Paris convention. It confirmed the exemptions to the general law of liability. Section 3, as amended in 1990, limits the compensation to be paid to the victims by the operator to 600 million francs and by the State to 2.5 billion francs. So, there is still a limitation upon the liability of private operators managing and operating nuclear plants. I do not agree with this approach.

Therefore there is a risk of major disasters. As my time is running out and the Chair is indicating to me that I have five minutes left, I will now talk about risk, waste and costs.

We already talked about risk. In terms of waste, last year Bill C-27 provided for large amounts of money to manage dangerous nuclear waste. It also provided for investments from every user. These were large amounts of money, but we do not know how far they will go. We are not even sure how long it will take.

However, as I said earlier, the United Stated has spent $8 billion in studies alone. Imagine what it means in terms of making storage secure or even ideally getting rid of and maybe completely eliminating waste. However, this does not seem possible.

So we are left with what I would call the terrible and catastrophic irresponsibility of our predecessors, who never really wondered how to manage waste, or even eliminate it, and what the impact would be. That is all I had to say about waste management.

With regard to costs, we know very well, for example, that federal subsidies to Atomic Energy Canada over the past 46 years amount in total to $15.8 billion in 1998 dollars.

It should be noted that this $15.8 billion subsidy is real money, and that it does not take into account the opportunity cost, that is what the subsidy would have been worth if the government had invested in less costly initiatives. At a rate of 15%, the opportunity cost of government subsidies to Atomic Energy Canada is $2.2 billion. You see how much money has been sunk into this. We can foresee how much more will be sunk in the future.

The question could be asked during an extensive debate on the nuclear industry. We could ask ourselves the following question: Can we opt out of nuclear energy? The answer is relatively simple. Yes, we can. People will ask what we can turn to. Saying yes, we can opt out of nuclear energy is saying yes to something else.

What are the alternatives? Our renewable resources, of course. Human beings need sun, water and air. The whole earth needs wind to operate properly and renew its own energy. It is the same, in terms of energy, as what the earth needs to operate.

Renewable energy sources are constantly replenished. As I said earlier, these sources are the sun, the wind, water and the biomass. If we put all the money that was invested in nuclear power and related fields, all the money that is still owed, at today's value, and the money we will have to spend to manage nuclear waste and environmental problems, if we invested all that money in renewable energy, we would not even need to bother with Kyoto. The problem would be settled quite quickly.

Here in Quebec—we are not in Quebec, actually—