Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Byrne, in actual fact, yes, Canadian carriers who fly into Europe do fall under the European rules. I had a letter just last week from a gentleman from Newfoundland who was on a flight from Rome. He was two hours late leaving Rome, so they gave him a meal voucher. By the time he got to Toronto to connect to his Newfoundland flight, he was three hours late. He said Air Canada simply dumped him. When he asked for a meal voucher, they said, “No, you get a meal voucher after a two-hour delay in Europe, but it's a four-hour delay in Canada. As for the hotel, forget about it; you're on your own.” He thought it right to write me a letter about this whole issue.
The airline can give us statistics. I hope members of the committee do ask the airline representatives for information on how much they have paid in penalties from 1991 onward for denied boarding only, and then from 2005 onward on how much they have paid in penalties and compensation for denied boarding and cancelled flights. That would be very important to know, because I honestly don't know. It seems to me that if they were paying a lot of penalties, they would either have to change their way of operating in Europe or else quit flying there. I haven't see any evidence yet that Air Canada is going to quit flying to Europe.
I might point out to you as well that in terms of the Steer Davies Gleave report that was done two years after the 2005 European regulations, it was very difficult to get information from the airlines. They requested information of the very type that I'm telling you about right now, and they couldn't get information. The committee may wish to have a representative from this body that did an independent analysis of the European regulation. They're totally unbiased. The person is very willing to cooperate with you and will not take a view one way or the other on the regulation.
At the end of the day, they recommended that the European rules should stay with the extraordinary circumstances. I'm sure the airlines will be asking you to have a clear definition of what that means. At the end of the day, on balance, this organization recommended that they should stick with what is working right now.