Bill C-459 (Historical)

Air Passengers' Bill of Rights

An Act respecting the rights of air passengers

This enactment places obligations on Canadian air carriers to provide compensation and other assistance to passengers in certain cases when a flight has been cancelled or delayed, when boarding has been denied, and when an aircraft has remained on the ground for a period of more than an hour at an airport. It also requires those air carriers to disclose all relevant information to the public regarding the pricing of flights and to keep passengers informed regarding any misplaced baggage and any developments in respect of their flights that could have a significant impact on their travel plans.

Transportation Modernization Act

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, as it often happens, the Liberal government's bills first and foremost protect big businesses, at the expense of the rights of workers and consumers. By amending 13 acts, the omnibus Bill C-49 is no exception. There is certainly no doubt that the Liberal members are going to support this bill, but I would still like to remind the House why the New Democrats want to oppose it.

After two years of waiting, the minister wants us to rush through a bill that is deeply flawed and primarily favours the interests of foreign investors, while violating the rights of workers and consumers. I will explain all the reasons why the New Democrats oppose Bill C-49.

First, in 2012, the NDP tabled Bill C-459, which clearly outlined the measures to be taken to create a proper passengers' bill of rights. This bill set out concrete measures, for example, providing for appropriate compensation for passengers who were denied boarding. That could have amounted to $600 for flights of 3,500 km or more. However, the Liberals voted against the amendment that proposed to include this bill of rights in Bill C-49, without even trying to study it.

Why did the Minister of Transport reject our amendment? He could have taken a page from our proposal, which included concrete measures to protect air travellers. It is even harder to understand when we consider the findings of a study showing that 0.4% of EU-regulated flights are cancelled, which is four times lower than the cancellation rate of flights under current Canadian regulations. It seems clear that the Liberals are giving in to pressure from the airlines and turning a blind eye to the studies on the issue.

Bill C-49 would also require railway companies to install voice and video recorders in the locomotive cabs. This seems to make sense for dealing with accidents, but it must not prompt the railways to use this information for surveillance or disciplinary purposes. That is why we are calling for the use of these voice and video recordings to be reserved exclusively for the Transportation Safety Board.

The provisions of Bill C-49 are not clear enough and do not spell out how the train conductors' private information will be used by the railways. For example, the minister could decide by regulation that a train conductor's hourly productivity is something to take in consideration in a safety review. Following that reasoning, Via Rail Canada could use this data to manage employee performance, for example, during a stop at the Saint-Hyacinthe station.

The employees are refusing to give up their right to privacy. The government is not listening to the testimony of people like Roland Hackl, vice-president of the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference. According to him, the bill, as currently drafted, goes against the employees' rights as Canadians, and he is right. Bill C-49 might be in contravention of section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it would authorize the government or employers to gather private information without providing adequate protections. What is more, according to the findings of a Transport Canada working group, voice and video recordings are not part of proactive safety management.

The NDP therefore proposed a series of amendments to ensure that only the Transportation Safety Board could have access to the recordings in the event of an accident. Our amendments would also guarantee that the minister and the railways would not be able to use the voice and video recordings. Obviously, the Liberals in committee once again summarily dismissed these proposals.

I would like to talk about the change in the agreement between the airlines included in Bill C-49. Currently, the competition commissioner may make an application to the Competition Tribunal to propose the rejection of a merger of airline companies that stifles competition. The Competition Tribunal therefore has the authority to cancel a merger or a part thereof. However, under Bill C-49, the Minister of Transport will now have the final say in the matter.

As soon as the minister approves the agreement, the Competition Tribunal can do nothing to stop it. The NDP is opposed to clause 14 of the bill because it gives the minister the power to supervise and authorize joint ventures between airlines.

Imagine if Air Canada submitted a proposal to merge with United Airlines. Even if the commissioner found that the agreement would reduce competition among airlines and could raise ticket prices, the minister could still approve the merger if he or she deemed it to be in the “public interest”. I challenge the minister to provide a precise definition of that term. In Bill C-49, it is so vague that the minister could include reasons that are not in Canadians' interest but in the interest of shareholders of major airlines. The Liberal government is trying to erode our consumer watchdog's authority.

Bill C-49 would also amend the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority Act, the CATSA act.

Instead of designating new airports and helping regional airports grow, the government is passing the cost of security screening on to them.

Why did the government not propose a fairer model in which CATSA is responsible for funding screening and security services?

The government has been withdrawing funding from this area for a long time. Statistics Canada data shows that the former government collected $636 million from the public but that it allocated only $550 million of that amount to air security. The Liberal government is no better, since it has continued to underfund CATSA. Clause 69 of the bill provides for the addition of subsection 30.1(1) to the act, under which any airport can enter into an agreement with CATSA to provide new screening and security services.

Everything is fine up to that point. However, it is up to the airport to pay for these new services, which means that passengers will be the ones to foot the bill. In contrast, the NDP proposed that public funding be put in place for the development of regional airports. Our amendment would have also prevented designated airports, such as those in Montreal and Toronto, from being forced to absorb the cost of enhancing security services.

Indirectly, our amendment also sought to ensure that the cost of enhancing security is not passed on to passengers via ticket prices. All of our proposals in that regard were also rejected. Unfortunately, that is not surprising. That is how the government has been withdrawing funding from regional airports and screening and security services in large airports.

The government wants users to cover the cost of its own policy of underfunding. Bill C-49 also creates a loophole in the Coasting Trade Act in clauses 70 to 72. We are asking that these clauses be deleted from the bill. Canadian shipowners and sailors' jobs—and I should point out that my son is a sailor—must be protected from unfair competition from ships registered in the European Union.

Why would that competition be unfair?

Simply because labour on EU-registered ships is not subject to the same requirements as labour on Canadian ships. Under the provisions of Bill C-49, crew costs for European ships authorized to navigate in Canadian waters are 30% of Canadian crew costs. What is even more appalling is that there is no reciprocity whatsoever. In fact, the minister could decide to allow the repositioning of empty containers by ships registered abroad, while Canadian ships will not have reciprocal access to the EU market.

We would also like to see clauses 73 and 74 deleted from Bill C-49, as those clauses authorize the Canada Infrastructure Bank to provide loans to port authorities.

Lastly, with regard to Bill C-49, I want to point out that we fully support improving the rights of air travellers and protections for grain shippers. Many grain farmers have acknowledged that Bill C-49 is a step in the right direction.

Grain farmers have, however, proposed measures that go even further.

I will close by saying that we strongly oppose Bill C-49.

Economic Action Plan 2013 Act No. 2

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-4, which was to be a budget implementation bill but it is much more. It is that much more that has a bunch of us on this side of the House worried about what the government really intends to do. For example, this budget implementation bill includes a redefinition of what constitutes a danger in the workplace.

The definition has been in the Canada Labour Code for many years and is well understood now by the health and safety officers, workplace safety committees, employers, and employees, and to change it in a manner that will not allow us to have full and fulsome debate is a dangerous practice in itself.

We will not know what the new definition means. The old definition talked about any existing or potential hazard or condition, or any current or future activity that could reasonably be expected to cause injury or illness to a person exposed to it.

The new definition requires that this danger be imminent or serious. What the heck does imminent or serious mean? To find out, we have to ask the minister. The minister is the only person who is now able, under this legislation, to determine whether something is an imminent or serious threat to an individual, because the government has taken out health and safety officers across the country and replaced them with one individual.

Each and every declaration of a danger to a person in a workplace in Canada now has to be determined by the minister himself or herself. I do not know if the minister has enough time to get to all the workplaces in Canada. The minister is pretty busy legislating companies back to work, so I do not know if he or she has enough time to do that.

It is a very serious measure that is being taken in a budget implementation bill with very limited time for discussion.

The other thing that is happening in the bill is that for the public service the definition of what can be arbitrated, in terms of what we call interest arbitration processes, has changed dramatically. The definition of what constitutes an essential service is now in the head of the minister. It is not in a jointly agreed to by both parties system.

The minister can decide what is an essential service in the civil service. For example, the minister could decide that his or her driver is an essential service and therefore that person would be prohibited from taking any action.

The danger with this kind of tinkering with the existing well-known and well-understood legislation is where it may lead in the rest of Canada. We have police forces, fire departments, ambulance services and paramedic services across the country that rely on an arbitration system to feel as though they are getting paid appropriately for their work and that their terms and conditions of work are dealt with. They are not allowed to go on strike. They are not allowed to exercise what the rest of Canadians have, which is the ability to withdraw their services.

All of those other folks across the country have to be wondering where the heck the government is going and where it will lead the provincial governments that deal with these things as well.

The government has not only redefined what is an essential service and just basically said that the minister can pick and choose what he or she wants it to be, but it has redefined what constitutes the terms under which an arbitrator can decide a collective agreement.

As members will recall from a year and a half ago, or maybe two years, the former minister of labour actually set the conditions under which an arbitrator was free or not free to decide a collective agreement. When it came to Air Canada, Canada Post and CP Rail, those agreements were decided by an arbitrator, except the arbitrator's hands were tied.

If I were in the police force or if I were a firefighter, I would be worried about where this federal government was leading us, down the road of re-defining what could and could not be done by an arbitrator.

I want to talk about this issue, because I am the deputy critic for persons with disabilities. The member for Winnipeg South Centre talked in glowing terms about the fact that the government had made the enabling accessibility fund a permanent feature of future budgets, which is a good thing. The problem is that fund is a Conservative slush fund, unfortunately. I do not mean that any of the groups that receive the money are somehow complicit in this, but 85% of the money goes to Conservative ridings.

Conservatives do not represent 85% of the population of Canada. I think something like 24% voted for them last time. How is it that 85% of the enabling accessibility fund goes to Conservative-held ridings, or if a group or organization is turned down for money under the enabling accessibility fund, all it has to do is have a friend like the Minister of Foreign Affairs and that minister will grease palms or whatever it is he has to do to change the decision by whoever made the decision so a group or association can get money out of the enabling accessibility fund?

We do not have any objections to there being an enabling accessibility fund. In fact, it should be bigger than it is, but we would like to see it distributed fairly across the country. I have groups in my riding that have been turned down for enabling accessibility money and cannot fathom the reasons why, because they are not given. There is no sudden decision that a group did not get it because of X, Y or Z. The decision is made that they just did not get it. When we hear that groups in Conservative-held ridings have no trouble getting money, we wonder where the money is coming from.

The other thing I want to say about the budget implementation act is that the government has determined it can add new stuff that was not in the budget. Not only were the issues dealing with the redefinition of what constitutes a danger, the removal of health and safety officers and replacing them with the minister, the changing of the arbitration for the civil service, but a redefinition of what constitutes a Supreme Court justice has been added, someone coming from Quebec. How is that in a budget bill? How is that something that we can think costs money? The Conservatives response, and I understand where they are coming from, but I do not like it, is that it is something that came up just recently, that they have to fix it really quick and that they can rush this thing through and get it done in a hurry.

There are a whole bunch of other things that came up just recently that have not been included in the bill but have to do with money, that have to do with budgets, that have to do with taxpayers and their pocketbooks. The Conservatives talked about them in the throne speech, but they are not here.

The throne speech talked about “pay to pay”. For those who do not know what that means, a cable TV or a cellphone subscriber with any of the big carriers in Canada has to by $2 to get a paper bill. If they do not have Internet to get their bill, they have to pay $2 and the government collects tax on that $2. No wonder it is delaying it because it wants to keep collecting that tax.

Most of the people affected by that are seniors who do not have access to the Internet, who do not have ready accessibility to electronic forms of payment. Not only that, even those people who have opted to get it electronically are now being told that if they want the detailed billing, they have to pay $3 to get it electronically, and the government will tax that. Therefore, there will 15¢ federally and in Ontario another 8¢ provincially going into the coffers of the government every time people pay their bill or accepts the bill in paper. The Conservatives promised to do something about that in the throne speech. Where is it? If they can do things really quick like this, why can they not put this in the budget implementation act?

There is no help for airline passengers. The Conservatives voted almost unanimously, if not unanimously, against Bill C-459, which would have provided a system to help airline passengers from the vagaries of the airlines bumping them off a flight. There was talk about that before the throne speech, but there is nothing in the throne speech or in the budget bill.

There is nothing in the budget bill that is a relief for the 200% increase in cable TV fares that have cable and satellite fees that have taken place since it was deregulated completely by the CRTC. In the throne speech the Conservatives did not even talk about that. They said that consumers would be able to pick and play whatever they want, but at a cost. If I pick a channel, it would cost me an arm and a leg. There is nothing in here for the pocketbook of the ordinary Canadian. If the Conservatives want to talk about pick and play, let us apply it to this legislation. We would like to pick and play those things that are good for Canadians and not have to vote against them, while we can vote against those things that are not good for Canadians. That is the kind of pick and play I would like to see.

We have no relief for bank fees. People from the Syme Seniors' Centre in my riding told me that just recently the banks told them that in order to get a printed statement of their bank account they would have to pay. It is a not-for-profit seniors centre that is trying to struggle through with whatever little money it can get from grants and the rest. It now has to pay to get that statement. It did not used to because it was a seniors centre. Now that it has to pay to get the statement, there is no relief. There is nothing in the budget bill that actually reduces those exorbitant bank fees.

We need to rethink how we do these budgets and not put things in a budget that have nothing to do with budgets.

Air Transportation

[José Nunez-Melo, NDP, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, last week, the Canadian Transportation Agency concluded that compensation offered to Air Canada customers bumped from overbooked flights is insufficient. That compensation would have been sufficient if the Conservatives had supported Bill C-459.

Why do the Conservatives feel that Canadian passengers do not deserve the same protection as Europeans and Americans?

The Conservative Government

[José Nunez-Melo, NDP, Laval, QC]

Mr. Speaker, March 28 was a dark day for the House of Commons. On that day, three important bills were arbitrarily rejected by the Conservative caucus.

The Conservative caucus overwhelmingly voted down the good intentions of providing justice and giving the Government of Canada the opportunity to do the right thing and support some just and worthy causes. Bill C-380 would have prohibited imports of shark fins. Bill C-459 would have helped consumers, in particular air passengers. Bill C-464 would have supported Canadian mothers in the event of multiple births.

On March 28, the ignorance of our honourable government colleagues was on display again. Even worse, they failed to grasp the negative consequences for which they will be held to account in the next election.