Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to join with you on what I and my colleagues in the House of Commons obviously think is a very serious issue.
As Mr. Maloway pointed out in his earlier words to us, his legislation today follows on a motion that was unanimously passed in the House of Commons calling on the Government of Canada to bring forward this kind of legislation.
While I think it's important to say that we all appreciate that you're open to amendments, there will probably be an intense lobby effort to try to convince parliamentarians that the essence of this bill is wrong, that it's not going to do justice either to passengers or to the industry. While it may be easy to dwell on certain aspects of this, I think it is abundantly clear that the overall thrust of having consumer protection in the airline industry in the 21st century is an absolute must. That is the overriding preoccupation here.
Joe Volpe and I were talking about this issue as I was forming my motion just a little over a year ago. We noted the situation that had faced the Cubana air passengers. There were domestic passengers as well. It wasn't just international passengers coming into Canada from Havana in this particular instance; other passengers were flying domestically as well.
Despite what some have suggested, there are basically no rules governing or providing for protections to airline passengers once they get past security and have their boarding passes. In fact, we noted that in the Cubana situation, after the passengers had spent 12 hours on board the aircraft here at Ottawa International Airport and after their five-hour flight before that, apparently the only way the RCMP duty officer at the time could actually render assistance to a passenger on board who had called 9-1-1 was to invoke the potential of the Criminal Code in dealing with forcible confinement. He had no tools available to him through the Aeronautics Act or through aviation regulation to allow for assistance to get those passengers off after they had spent 17 hours on that plane. That really tells the tale of the state of consumer protection in the airline industry in Canada.
You mentioned something about the European Union. We all know that the European Union has pretty strong and effective consumer protection for airline passengers. In fact, it invoked it across the entire 26-member European Union as a common market. Air Canada, WestJet, Air Transat, and other Canadian air carriers currently fly into the European Union. Could you clarify whether those Canadian carriers are actually subject to the European Union airline passenger bill of rights? I think I know the answer, but it would be good to get it on record.
Second, Canada recently signed an open skies agreement with the European Union. Not only was it an open skies agreement, but we also agreed to create greater barrier-free access to European air carriers in Canada and to Canadian air carriers operating in Europe. We also agreed, as part of that, to harmonize regulatory safety standards.
This is an interesting situation. We're harmonizing the market systems of airline carriers in Europe, but we're also prepared to harmonize our safety systems. Why don't you think we're prepared to harmonize consumer protections? The European Union has a legislated consumer protection regime that every European base carrier airline has to operate under, even when they're outside European airspace. Canada is obliged to operate that...when they leave European airspace, leave the European aerodrome.
Why do you think we left that particular provision out?